Andrew Reynolds

A Saxon and Saxo-Norman Execution Cemetery at 42–54 London Road, Staines

An excavation on the southern side of London Road, Staines, in 1999 revealed a dense concentration of ancient features surviving amidst the concrete foundations of a recently demolished office building. These features included a number of Bronze Age pits, many of which were intercut; pits, ditches and a well of late Roman origin; and the remains of approximately thirty inhumation burials, most or all of which were of late Saxon or early Norman origin. The majority, if not all, of the burials were of execution victims. Some of the bodies were face down within the grave, others had been decapitated, and some were in graves containing two or three bodies. The cemetery shares various characteristics with other excavated execution sites and the evidence from Staines is placed within a regional and national context. The site is one of few execution cemeteries dated by radiocarbon with a chronology spanning at least the eighth to the twelfth century. This longevity adds weight to the case for a centrally organized judicial system during the growth period of the major Early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Travel as communication: a consideration of overland journeys in Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract This paper considers the relationship between the act of travel and perceptions of landscape drawing upon case studies from Anglo-Saxon England. Two perspectives are offered. First, we address the issue of large-scale mental mapping of journeys and the degree to which moving from one place to another can be reconstructed using the landscape as a document. Second, we examine how local territories, regions and their boundary markers reveal a folkloric or ‘story-telling’ mythologizing of landscape as an early medieval practice, and the impact that this may have had on the experience of travel. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between what we term ‘direct’ and ‘associative’ experience of landscape and that local experience inspired emotive reactions to unfamiliar landscapes. We promote the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach and our case studies draw upon archaeological, written and toponymic evidence.

Judicial culture and social complexity: a general model from Anglo-Saxon England

The development of so-called ‘complex societies’ is a central concern of social science, and a theme to which the discipline of archaeology has made perhaps the most significant contributions with regard to the origins and earlier development of social systems in past societies. Almost all of the features that are widely accepted as indicators of social complexity – urbanism, social hierarchy, organized religion and so on – have been characterized and placed in sequence principally through the lens of physical evidence. That other fundamental feature of complex societies – writing – provides the most accessible view of yet another key attribute: legal culture. It is well known that legal texts are among the earliest forms of writing to survive in many regions, but in general archaeology has yet to make inroads into the study of the emergence and development of legal and judicial culture in the past. This paper focuses specifically upon judicial practice and explores the range and nature of archaeological correlates for such activity at progressive stages of societal development, from kin-based societies to large-scale polities. The case-study material is derived from Anglo-Saxon England, where an exceptional body of textual material relating to legal culture and a substantial archaeological dimension – comprising court sites, places of ordeal and confinement and execution places – facilitates a finely grained reconstruction of the emergence and development of legal culture. A general model is proposed for testing in cross-cultural and cross-chronological contexts. Notions of increasingly agglomerated administrative functions as a reflection of developing complexity are also discussed with reference to an alternative view from Anglo-Saxon England.

Landscapes of defence in early medieval Europe

This volume is the result of a conference at University College London in 2007 which addressed the scale and form of civil defences in early medieval Europe, c. 800-1000.

Middle Anglo-Saxon Justice: the Chesterton Lane Corner execution cemetery and related sequence, Cambridge

A Middle Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Chesterton Lane Corner, Cambridge, has been radiocarbon dated to the seventh to ninth centuries with its floruit in the eighth century and evidence that many of the individuals buried there were executed. Intriguingly, there is also a Late Roman decapitation burial at the site. The evidence for Middle Anglo-Saxon Cambridge is reviewed and the relationship between justice and central places is considered.

B.I.E.A. Excavations at Aksum, Northern Ethiopia, 1995

This paper describes the results of the first two seasons of fieldwork at Aksum, Northern Ethiopia, particularly the excavation of a middle rank settlement of the Aksumite period.

The archaeology of travel and communication: introduction

Much is made in the modern world of the ability of humans to compress time and space by means of faster travel and communications. The globe can be traversed in a matter of hours. The growth of social networking has created a web of instant contact. Recent decades have witnessed the development of ‘space tourism’, which – as a function of the spiralling reach of commerce – is now set to become a possibility for very many more people than was ever once imaginable. Indeed, since the initial space explorations by the USSR and USA in the 1950s and 1960s it is now even possible to conceive of an extraterrestrial archaeology. Towards the distant end of the scale of human existence, the 3.5million-year-old footprints of three individuals preserved in volcanic ash at Laetoli, near Olduvai Gorge, present one of the most iconic images of human history. Contemporary society might be rather impressed with itself for its achievements, but what of the range and nature of travel and communication in past societies? Is it possible to establish linkages between different types and stages of society, travel and communication? Human movement on the macro-scale has been a central concern of those attempting to map human origins and the colonization of the globe by hominins. Migration and diaspora loom large in archaeological discourse on a global scale, and there is an extensive literature, while anthropology has generated a series of thought-provoking studies, which emphasize the centrality of memory in a landscape context, a concept that by definition requires movement. A current theme in the field of geography with resonances for archaeological enquiry is that of ‘mobilities’. Archaeology has traditionally focused on the beginnings and ends of journeys, working from the evidence of commodities traded, the spread and influence of art and architectural styles and on the basis of comparative readings of social and cultural traditions. Exceptions – at least in Britain – which have seen much attention, include attempts to chart the route by which the bluestones at Stonehenge were transported from the Preselli Hills in Wales to central southern England, the study of the ‘trade’ in Neolithic stone axes, and of vessels manufactured of gabbroic clay from the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall during the Neolithic period. Such investigations served to revolutionize perceptions of the ability and propensity of humans to move over extensive distances in later British prehistory. Students of rock art throughout the world have recently considered the relationships between depictions of animals on rocks, their migration patterns and the movements of the humans that hunted them. Even more recently, the results of strontium isotope analyses are revealing the realities of long-distance movements of individuals and

Avebury : A Late Anglo-Saxon burh?

This note presents the suggestion that the early medieval settlement of Avebury was developed as a fortified town in the 9th century

Lineage, genealogy and landscape: a high-resolution archaeological model for the emergence of supra-local society from early medieval England

ABSTRACT This paper considers the socio-political implications of a series of closely spatially and temporally related early medieval cemeteries from England and how they might be read as charting the emergence of both individual communities and of collective supra-local society. The case study is from early post-Roman Britain in a region that during the sixth century AD became the historically documented Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. Four distinct communities appropriated an earlier burial landscape, arguably by a process of negotiation, reflecting the formation of a small-scale, supra-local society based around a site of occasional gathering. A key notion is that periodic gathering and local stability could be core features of large-scale polity formation. Overall, a case is made for the long-term cohesion of a local territory, reliant on an ancient mode of social organization.

Introduction: the archaeology of legal culture

In recent decades, archaeological discourse has expanded beyond earlier paradigms concerned primarily with chronology, typology, and function. Archaeologies of gender, the body, the household, childhood, ritual, magic, and sexuality, among others, have merged with more traditional interests in social processes, cultural evolution, adaptation, subsistence change, and migration, among others, to create increasingly nuanced, speculative, controversial, and hopefully more holistic, understandings of the past as it is materialized and understood in the present through the archaeological record. Yet, in a field that appears to have almost as many subspecialties as it has practitioners, the archaeology of law, legal culture, and legal practice has been almost entirely overlooked. While many books have been written since the nineteenth century on ancient legal texts recovered from archaeological sites, known through classical literature, or documented as practice in early colonial sources (Oppert and Menant, 1877; Bühler 1886; Barton, 1901; Muss-Arnolt, 1901; Kramer, 1956; Coleman-Norton, 1960; Diamond, 1971; Avalos 1994; Tetlow, 2004), it is nearly impossible to find any books that use archaeological data as the material evidence from which to examine the nature of law in past societies, its variability in space and time, or its roles in supporting or subordinating the various agents, actors, factions, and classes that constituted the societies of the past that we study today. In part, this may be due to a contemporary and culturally bound sense of the law as a largely abstract and almost infinite body of norms enshrined in texts and performed in state-sponsored institutional contexts to support, enforce, or punish actions between actors, and not as a body of practices leaving enduring material correlates. In Leopold Pospisil’s (1958) terms, law is generally conceived of as “rules or modes of conduct made obligatory by some sanction which is imposed and enforced for their violation by a controlling authority”. Archaeology, as a discipline more inclined to study “what was done” than “what ought to have been done” finds shallow purchase on these sheer rocks, where law itself remains an abstraction. The anthropological study of law, however, demonstrates that laws and legal practices, of various types and with various sanctions, are found in all societies that have been studied ethnographically or ethnohistorically (Malinowski, 1926; Radcliffe-Brown, 1933; Hoebel, 1954; Redfield 1964; Bohannan, 1965; Hunt, 1997, 1998; Hunt and Gilman, 1998) and not only in states with written law codes and formally instituted courts. The definition of society itself is largely a question of law, and to the extent that this is the case for the present and the actively documented recent past, it must also have been so both in distant pasts and in less-documented near-pasts accessed primarily through the archaeological record. Then, as now, changes in what