The British culture of Anglo-Saxon settlement. 24

A non-Celticist who tries to explore the indigenous British background to Anglo-Saxon culture risks misreading signposts in unfamiliar territory. But a purely Anglo-Saxon theme would do less than justice to the wide interdisciplinary interests of the Chadwicks, and indeed of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. My main excuse for being here is that I have spent the past three years on a major research project investigating the settlement archaeology of England between 600 and 1100 in the light of data retrieved during four decades of developer-funded excavation. It would be sad if an exercise on that scale had nothing new to say about the cultures with which the English interacted, and although my subject has been the Anglo-Saxon zone within Britain, I could not avoid asking how that zone should be defined in relation to the various neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons.