CAMBRIDGE, England – The last year has seen announcements of a number of significant archaeological discoveries in the United Kingdom.
A gold ornament buried beneath tree roots and discovered by a metal detectorist in 2017 was revealed early this year as likely to have belonged to Henry VIII’s crown.
Just started the first brooch from @Kings_College excavation. After photography and condition assessment including xrays we will start removing soils and corrosion under the microscope. #ArchaeologicalConservation #xrays #AlbionArchaeology pic.twitter.com/xZDe8ULXVZ
— Drakon Heritage and Conservation (@drakonheritage) March 3, 2021
In addition, more information has been released regarding a series of Medieval graves located beneath halls of residence at King’s College Cambridge in the summer of 2020. The college has recently demolished the halls, which were built in the 1930s, in order to upgrade their student accommodation, and in addition to 60 Medieval graves they have also uncovered Roman and Iron Age workings. The graves and bones are well preserved due to the site’s alkaline soil.
Archaeologists have believed that west Cambridge was the home of an Anglo Saxon gravesite since the 19th century and this discovery has been described as the most significant Anglo Saxon excavation in the U.K., perhaps potentially rivaling the importance of Sutton Hoo.
A team from Albion Archaeology has unearthed 700 items in the graves and these include bronze brooches, swords, and other blades, bead necklaces, glass flasks, and pottery. Most date from the 4th century to the 7th, but some are likely to be earlier.
The Roman population at the time would have been rural, since Cambridge was not yet a town. The early commentator, Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, which was written in the eighth century, said that the area around what is now Cambridge was abandoned after the withdrawal of the Roman occupation, but experts point out that Bede was writing over 250 years later and his informants were based north and east of Cambridge, a settlement which was not as significant in his period as Peterborough or Ramsey, for example.
Dr. Catherine Goodson, who teaches early medieval history at King’s, said in an interview with The Guardian, that in this post-Imperial Britain, “We already know that Cambridge wasn’t fully abandoned. But what we’re seeing now is a greater and clearer picture of life in the post-Roman settlements. They are no longer living as the Romans did, they’re eating differently, dressing differently and finding different ways of exploiting the land. They are changing the way they are living during a period of considerable fluidity.”
It is possible that some Roman goods discovered in the graves come from an earlier period, perhaps as a result of people clinging to Roman ways (or perhaps because they just liked the item that is buried with them).
Dr. Sam Lucy of Cambridge University said the bodies “tend to be people buried fully dressed, so they’ve got brooches and beads holding bits of clothing together. Some of them have got spearheads and the former remains of shields with them.”
She adds that the recent finds “give huge potential for further research and actually finding out what was going on in the Cambridge area during this particular period. We get a really nice picture of a community and death and we try to use that to tell us a bit about how they were living their lives as well.”
Archaeologists are, for instance, keen to determine if any of the bodies died as a result of the Justinianic plague (probably bubonic plague, which at its height around the 6th century was said to be killing 5000 people in Constantinople every day).
As a result, Kings College is funding a four-year research fellowship into late Medieval and early Roman Britain.
The Kings College site is not the only one in Cambridge in which housing projects have revealed Anglo-Saxon finds.
Cambridge Archaeological Unit was brought in ahead of a new housing development at Trumpington in 2010 and has resulted in the discovery of a young, high-status Anglo-Saxon woman buried in a bed, plus a large number of grave goods including gold and garnet crosses.
Gold and garnet cross – Image credit: Ethan Doyle White – CC BY-SA 4.0
This, plus the fact that Trumpington was an early Christian site, suggests that the young woman, who was still in her teens, may have been Christian rather than Pagan, perhaps an eminent member of one of the very early Christian communities in rural East Anglia (early Christians did not prohibit grave goods).
Gold pins from the Trumpington bed burial site – Image credit: Ethan Doyle White – CC BY-SA 4.0
All of these recent discoveries are contributing to building up a picture of post-Roman Britain. The idea that the country reverted to primitive conditions after the legions were pulled out is no longer seen as accurate: the recent find of a magnificent post-Roman mosaic at a villa in Gloucestershire suggests that a number of people were trying to maintain the life that they or their forebears had known under the occupation (the ‘change vs continuity’ debate which is referenced below).
The degree to which this persisted, as England fell under increasing assault from the Saxon Shore and other east coast points of vulnerability, has yet to be determined, but finds such as the Saxon graveyard in Cambridge gives us a clearer view of how all these early Britons may have seen the Romans and their way of life. Such finds also give a clearer picture of the extent of trade at this time: the garnets in the Anglo Saxon cross mentioned above may have come from as far away as India and we know that some of the Romano-Celtic chieftains possessed items from Constantinople.
British Pagan and Shamanic practitioner, Karen Kelly told TWH, “… this is the second site in the vicinity which seems to be producing both late Roman and early Saxon burials. There is a major research thing at the moment looking at bone DNA and isotopic analysis (look at ‘after the plague’ on the dept. website) on burials.”
Kelly continued, “They are certainly looking at the other site (Hatherdene Close). Interesting, as it may help address the change vs continuity debate. If they are using the same cemeteries and the burials seem to respect each other, it argues for continuity. If DNA and isotopic analysis shows they are the same, it may prove it.”
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