Anglo-Saxon Landscapes - Real and Imaginary

Saturday 16^th October 2004

at

The Royal Hospital School, Holbrook near Ipswich

A well received theme, distinguished speakers and an impressive venue look set to make this a lively event and we are expecting it to generate much interest.

9am – 5.30pm

Lunch inclusive

Society members £17.50

Non-members £20.00

Students £10.00

Full details, including programme and booking form will be available April 2004. To reserve a booking, please send your details to:

The Treasurer, Sutton Hoo Society, 2  Meadowside, Wickham Market, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP13 0UD

Joint Chairmen:

Professor Martin Carver and Angela Care Evans

Speakers:

Andrew Rogerson     

New models of landscape change?

Peter Fowler 

Agriculture before Domesday: farming was as farming always had been – or was it 

Helena Hamerow

Continental and Scandinavian Landscapes of Early Medieval Europe

David Dumville

Anglo-Saxon Territories

John Newman

A Landscape in Hiding – the living and the dead 400 – 800AD

Tom Williamson

Angles and Saxons Geographically Considered

Norman Scarfe

Closing address  

Dr. Andrew Rogerson is Senior Landscape Archaeologist, Norfolk Museums Service. He will present the argument that few would wish to see the survival for much longer of traditional notions of the Roman to Anglo-Saxon transition. But what are we to put in their place? The vastly greater sets of data on the 4^th to 7^th centuries now available for Norfolk should help us to establish new models of landscape change. Cautiously optimistic, he suggests that we will be considerably wiser once the new information is digested. The picture may be complex and made more so by sub-regional varaiations.

Professor Peter Fowler was Professor of Archaeology at Newcastle University. He now divides his time between travelling, lecturing, writing, painting and as a consultant, mainly in World Heritage matters with UNESCO. He will present an overall, but necessarily brief, review of British agriculture during the first millennium AD and will attempt to place Anglo-Saxon farming in some sort of cultural, spatial and temporal context, paying particular attention to fields, tools and crops as indicators of possible answers to the titular question. 

Dr. Helena Hamerow  is Lecturer in Early Medieval Archaeology at University of Oxford and Fellow of St.Cross College. Her lecture will focus on early medieval continental and Scandinavian landscapes. If we think we know about the landscapes in England, what about the continent? Did they have a bounded landscape? How did their settlements and cemeteries relate? Were they mobile or static?

Professor David Dumville is Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies at Girton College Cambridge. He has published and lectured extensively in this country and abroad.  His lecture will consider territorial concepts. When did parishes, estates, regions, kingdoms get going? Did they emerge from virgin land or was that land owned, bounded and populated right from the start? How did these units of Anglo-Saxon England evolve?

 John Newman is Field Officer with Suffolk County Council Archaeoligical Service with a long and extensive involvement in various key projects fundamental to the understanding of the Anglo-Saxon period in East Anglia. He led the south-east Kingdom of East Anglia Survey Project during the 1980’s and is an authority on the Suffolk Sandlings which includes Sutton Hoo. He will put forward the argument that earlier Anglo-Saxon settlement is traditionally seen as being concentrated on the lighter soils of East Anglia. In addition research has tended to be focused within a framework that is often parish based or biased through a single settlement/cemetery view projected back from a more secure historical context. However, these views can now be challenged using a wealth of data recovered in recent years.

Dr. Tom Williamson is Lecturer at the Centre of East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia. Author of numerous publications and books he is an authority on Landscape Archaeology. His lecture will expand the argument that archaeologists have tended to shy away from the kinds of crude geographical analyses of distributions which were popular in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Cemeteries and other sites are no longer considered in relation to putative roads, trackways, navigable rivers and areas of supposed open ground. He suggests it is time to revisit the geography of early Anglo-Saxon settlement, using models developed by local and regional historians. Concepts of ‘river’ and ‘wold’, patterns of drainage, and patterns of communication and contact can, in a number of ways, help us to understand the distributions of particular types of artefact, different kinds of cemetery, and indeed the absence of early cemeteries from large areas of southern and eastern England.

Norman Scarfe is a distinguished local historian and the author of several informative books on the landscape and history of Suffolk. He took part in Rupert Bruce Mitford’s re-excavation of the Mound 1 ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1966 and has been a stalwart supporter of the Sutton Hoo Society since its formation in 1984. We are delighted that he has agreed to give the closing address.