The question of the British presence in Anglo-Saxon England readdressed by archaeologists, historians, linguists, and place-name specialists. The number of native Britons, and their role, in Anglo-Saxon England has been hotly debated for generations; the English were seen as Germanic in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth saw a reinvention of the German "past". Today, the scholarly community is as deeply divided as ever on the issue: place-name specialists have consistently preferred minimalist interpretations, privileging migration from Germany, while other disciplinary groups have been less united in their views, with many archaeologists and historians viewing the British presence, potentially at least, as numerically significant or even dominant. The papers collected here seek to shed new light on this complex issue, by bringing together contributions from different disciplinary specialists and exploring the interfaces between various categories of knowledge about the past. They assemble both a substantial body of evidence concerning the presence of Britons and offer a variety of approaches to the central issues of the scale of that presence and its significance across the seven centuries of Anglo-Saxon England. NICK HIGHAM is Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester. Contributors: RICHARD COATES, MARTIN GRIMMER, HEINRICH HARKE, NICK HIGHAM, CATHERINE HILLS, LLOYD LAING, C.P. LEWIS, GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER, O.J. PADEL, DUNCANPROBERT, PETER SCHRIJVER, DAVID THORNTON, HILDEGARD L.C. TRISTRAM, DAMIAN TYLER, HOWARD WILLIAMS, ALEX WOOLF

The subject matter of archaeology is the engagement of human beings, now and in the past, with both the natural world and the material world they have created. All aspects of human activity are potentially relevant to archaeological research, and, conversely, the ways in which others, especially artists and anthropologists, have investigated the world are of interest to archaeologists. Archaeological artefacts and sites are also used by groups and nations to establish identity, and for financial gain, both through tourism and trade in antiquities. Colin Renfrew has actively engaged with art, with politics and with the antiquities trade, and has presented his ideas to broad audiences through accessible books and television programmes, as well as championing the cause of archaeology in many public roles. The papers in this volume, which have been written by colleagues and former students on the occasion of his retirement, relate to all of these subject areas, and together give some idea of the complexity of the issues raised by critical engagements with the material world, both past and present.

Spong Hill, with over 2500 cremations, remains the largest early Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery to have been excavated in Britain. This volume presents the long-awaited chronology and synthesis of the site. It gives a detailed overview of the artefactual evidence, which includes over 1200 objects of bone, antler and ivory. Using this information, together with programmes of correspondence analysis of the cremation urns and the grave-goods, a revised phasing and chronology of the site is offered, which argues that it is largely fifth-century in date. The implications of this revised dating for interpretations of the early medieval period in Britain and further afield are explored in full.

The newest research on a major Anglo-Saxon site paints a vivid picture of the beginnings of England. [Edited by Martin Carver] For decades scholars have puzzled over the true story of settlement in Britain between the fifth and eight centuries. Did the Romans leave? Did the Anglo-Saxons invade? What happened to the British? Newlight on these questions comes unexpectedly from Wasperton, a small village on the Warwickshire Avon, where archaeologists had the good fortune to excavate a complete cemetery and its prehistoric setting. The community reused an old Romano-British agricultural enclosure, and built burial mounds beside it. There was a score of cremations in Anglo-Saxon pots; but there were also unfurnished graves lined with stones and planks in the manner of western Britain. In a pioneering analysis, including radiocarbon and stable isotopes, the authors of this book have put this variety of burial practice into a credible sequence, and built up a picture of life at the time. Here there were people who were culturally Roman, British and Anglo-Saxon, pagan and Christian in continuous use of the same graveyard and drawing on a common inheritance. Here we can see the beginnings of England and the people who made it happen- not the kings, warriors and preachers, but the ordinary folk obliged to make their own choices: choices about what nation to build and which religion to follow. MARTIN CARVER is Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at the University of York; Dr CATHERINE HILLS is Senior Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Archaeology at the University of Cambridge; Dr JONATHAN SCHESCHKEWITZ is Officer with the Ancient Monuments authority of Stuttgart.

National origins remain as important as they have ever been to our sense of identity. Accounts of the early history of the peoples of Europe, including the English, are key tools in our construction of that identity. National identity has been studied through a range of different types of evidence - historical, archaeological, linguistic and most recently genetic. This has caused problems of interdisciplinary communication. In this book Catherine Hills carefully and succinctly unravels these different perceptions and types of evidence to assess how far it is really possible to understand when and how the people living in south and east Britain became 'English'.