Polities and Princes Ad 400–800: New Perspectives on the Funerary Landscape of the South Saxon Kingdom

Abstract

Summary Burials, borders and boundaries are themes much pursued in early medieval research. Barrow burials, in particular, have been suggested as markers or ‘sentinel graves’; funerary monuments used to define territorial boundaries and entrance points to kingdoms. This paper assesses the burial evidence of the fifth to eighth centuries from West Sussex, England, taking a topographic perspective and examining the uses made of ancient remains and natural topography. Certain distinctive topographic traits in cemetery and burial placement are argued to exist and, when considered alongside the written accounts of the kingdom, are suggested here as evidence for putative early micro‐kingdom structures, centred around the major river valleys, surviving into and perhaps even beyond the seventh century AD.

Death and the family

“…Early medieval communities may have determined the location and style of local cemeteries at different times and in different places. In these cemeteries many of the members of that community would have been interred in the same space and the individual burial events would have involved participants from that community, as well as surrounding communities (Semple, 2008), all acting to create social notions of the past and create or recreate relationships within local contexts. The perspective outlined in this article investigates not who attended a funeral but, through the consideration of social time, which members of a local community would have been able to participate in each other's lives and so act as agents when a funeral was being prepared.…”

Sarunas Milisauskas, ed. European Prehistory: A Survey, 2nd ed. (Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology, New York: Springer, 2011, 496pp., 154 b/w illustr., hbk, ISSN 1568-2722, ISBN 978-1-4419-6632-2, e-ISBN 978-1-4419-6633-9)

“…In many ways, the core of this work is the second chapter, which assesses reuse in AD 400-800 with three case studies described as 'core' or 'heartland' areas of Anglo-Saxon hegemony: North Wiltshire, West Sussex, and East Yorkshire. This is also the least original part of the book as each case study largely summarizes work published elsewhere, in two cases by the author (Semple, 2003(Semple, , 2008. This chapter takes the 'classic' approach to early medieval monument reuse, describing patterns of burial in relation to settlement.…”