Essays examining how punishment operated in England, from c.600 to the Norman Conquest. Anglo-Saxon authorities often punished lawbreakers with harsh corporal penalties, such as execution, mutilation and imprisonment. Despite their severity, however, these penalties were not arbitrary exercises of power. Rather, theywere informed by nuanced philosophies of punishment which sought to resolve conflict, keep the peace and enforce Christian morality. The ten essays in this volume engage legal, literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to investigate the role of punishment in Anglo-Saxon society. Three dominant themes emerge in the collection. First is the shift from a culture of retributive feud to a system of top-down punishment, in which penalties were imposed by an authority figure responsible for keeping the peace. Second is the use of spectacular punishment to enhance royal standing, as Anglo-Saxon kings sought to centralize and legitimize their power. Third is the intersectionof secular punishment and penitential practice, as Christian authorities tempered penalties for material crime with concern for the souls of the condemned. Together, these studies demonstrate that in Anglo-Saxon England, capital and corporal punishments were considered necessary, legitimate, and righteous methods of social control. Jay Paul Gates is Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in The City University of New York; Nicole Marafioti is Assistant Professor of History and co-director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Contributors: Valerie Allen, Jo Buckberry, Daniela Fruscione, Jay Paul Gates, Stefan Jurasinski, Nicole Marafioti, Daniel O'Gorman, Lisi Oliver, Andrew Rabin, Daniel Thomas.

The role of pastoral care reconsidered in the context of major changes within the Anglo-Saxon church. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw a number of very significant developments in the history of the English Church, perhaps the most important being the proliferation of local churches, which were to be the basis of the modern parochial system. Using evidence from homilies, canon law, saints' lives, and liturgical and penitential sources, the articles collected in this volume focus on the ways in which such developments were reflected in pastoral care, considering what it consisted of at this time, how it was provided and by whom. Starting with an investigation of the secular clergy, their recruitment and patronage, the papers move on to examine a variety of aspects of late Anglo-Saxon pastoral care, including church due payments, preaching, baptism, penance, confession, visitation of the sick and archaeological evidence of burial practice. Special attention is paid to the few surviving manuscripts which are likely to have been used in the field and the evidence they provide for the context, the actions and the verbal exchanges which characterised pastoral provisions.

Papers presented at the Twelfth Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology held in Cambridge, September 2010. Contents: Introduction (Mitchell and Buckberry); 1) Human Evolution after the Origin of our Species: Bridging the gap between Palaeoanthropology and Bioarchaeology (Stock); 2) Sexual Dimorphism in Adult Skeletal Remains at Ban Non Wat, Thailand, during the Intensification of Agriculture in Early Prehistoric Southeast Asia (Clark, Tayles and Halcrow); 3) The Bioarchaeology of Agriculture in the Southern Levant: A Comparative Study of Epipaleolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Bronze Age Agriculturalists (Gasperetti); 4) Where Have we Been, Where Are we Now, and What Does the Future Hold? Palaeopathology in the UK over the Last 30 Years, with a Few Bees in my Bonnet (Roberts); 5) The Paleoparasitology of 17th-18th Century Spitalfields in London (Anastasiou, Mitchell and Jeffries); 6) Integrated Strategies for the use of Lipid Biomarkers in the Diagnosis of Ancient Mycobacterial Disease (Lee, Bull, Molnar, Marcsick, Palfi, Donoghue, Besra and Minnikin); 7) A Comparative Study of Markers of Occupational Stress in Coastal Fishers and Inland Agriculturalists from Northern Chile (Ponce); 8) The Human Remains from the Medieval Islamic Cemetery of Can Fonoll, Ibiza, Spain: Preliminary Results (Kyriakou, Marquez-Grant, Langstaff, Samuels, Pacelli, Castro, Roig and Kranioti); 9) A New Known Age and Sex Collection at the Natural History Museum, London (Delbarre, Clegg, Kruszynski and Bonney); 10) Implementation of Preliminary Digital Radiographic Examination in the Confines of the Crypt of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London (Bekvalac); 11) A Revised Method for Assessing Tooth Wear in the Deciduous Dentition (Clement and Freyne); 12) A Study of Interobserver Variation in Cranial Measurements and the Resulting Consequences when Analysed using CranID (Slater and Smith); 13) Early Bronze Age Busta in Cambridgeshire? On-Site Experiments to Investigate the Effects of Fires and Pyres on Pits (Dodwell); 14) Archaeological Insights into the Disarticulation Pattern of a Human Body in a Sitting/Squatting Position (Gerdau Radonic); 15) Mortuary Practices at Aztalan: A Reappraisal of an Elite Burial at a Middle Mississippian Site in the Western Great Lakes Region of the Midwestern United States (Sullivan and Rodell); 16) Stature of Burials Interred with Weapons in Early Medieval England (Mays); The Uses of Field Anthropology on the Excavation of the St-Rumbold Cemetery, Mechelen, Belgium (Van de Vijver ).

Traditionally the study of early medieval burial practices in England has focused on the furnished burials of the early Anglo-Saxon period with those of the later centuries perceived as uniform and therefore uninteresting. The last decade has seen the publication of many important cemeteries and synthetic works demonstrating that such a simplistic view of later Anglo-Saxon burial is no longer tenable. The reality is rather more complex, with social and political perspectives influencing both the location and mode of burial in this period. This edited volume is the first that brings together papers by leading researchers in the field and illustrates the diversity of approaches being used to study the burials of this period. The overarching theme of the book is differential treatment in death, which is examined at the site-specific, settlement, regional and national level. More specifically, the symbolism of conversion-period grave good deposition, the impact of the church, and aspects of identity, burial diversity and biocultural approaches to cemetery analysis are discussed.