User:Jheald/sandbox/AS state evolution

Origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms / structures for force-projection.

• When? Comparison with Germania? War-bands etc ?

Additional to:

Talk:Anglo-Saxons#Social_differentiation

• Hamerow (2005) "The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms" in Paul Fouracre (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History, I, c. 500-c. 700 p. 263

big-picture ("processual") model:

• Renfrew, C. (1982). Post collapse resurgence: culture process in the dark ages. Ranking, Resource and Exchange. Aspects of the Archaeology of Early European Society, ed. Colin Renfrew/Stephen Shennan (Cambridge 1982), 113-115

"chiefdoms" rather than "states", in anthropological terminology, until Offa / Alfred -- rather than kingdoms

Chris Scull

(Publications / academia.edu):

• Scull, C. (1999). "Social archaeology and Anglo-Saxon kingdom origins". Anglo-Saxon Stud. Archaeol. Hist, 10. 17–24

(p. 17) "processual or social archaeology was initially resisted or ignored, and ... there has been little explicit use and development of processual models or perspectives in Anglo-Saxon archaeology. The reasons for this are worth considering. There has been a genuine feeling that such approaches were inappropriate and unnecessary: kingdoms were taken as a given, and the historical framework gave plausible explanations -- conquest and consolidation -- for their origins and development. It was also relevant that much influential literature on state formation dealt with the origins of early states in -- for example -- Meso-America, Mesopotamia, and the Bronze-Age Aegean, societies where the physical expressions of social and political stratification conformed to modern perceptions of what a state should look like, but where this was sufficiently far removed from the evidence for Anglo-Saxon England to make the application of general models of social and political evolution appear unattractive."

ESM shows that some of the reservations had a genuine basis.

peer competition / competitive exclusion

(p.21) "The evidence for community and social structure over much of southern and eastern England in the fifth and sixth centuries is consistent with a model of broadly-equal, internally-ranked, patrilineal and patrilocal descent groups farming or exploiting ancestral territories. The cemetery evidence suggests unequal social relations, but this appears to be more marked within communities than between them... little clear evidence for regional or paramount elites before the later sixth century".

structure developed once limits were hit to freely available land?

(p.23) "The ranked societies of the fifth and sixth centuries were capable of political integration to the extent that would support local chieftains and an impermanent or cyclical regional hegemony, but the establishment and maintenance of any permanent regional overlordship required, and precipitated or accelerated, permanent social and political change." ... "Some local chieftains of the fifth or sixth centuries may have considered themselves kings, but we may doubt whether they would have been recognised as such by the major rulers of the seventh century, or by contemporary Frankish monarchs."

• Scull, C. (1995). "Approaches to material culture and social dynamics of the Migration Period in eastern England". In J. Bintliffe and H. Hamerow (eds), Europe between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: recent archaeological and historical research in western and southern Europe. Oxford: BAR S617 71–83

(p. 71) "It is notorious that the archaeological approaches to migration-period England have been conditioned by these [written] sources... fairly simple archaeological models, conditioned by the historical narrative or by inferences drawn from it, have remained influential... there are scholars for whom an approach to the material evidence which is rooted in the historical sources remains the favoured option."

"Historians who take a purist view would now increasingly question the narrative validity of the handful of relevant sources"

• Sims-Williams (1983a, b) "Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons", Cambridge Medieval Celtic Stud. 6, 1-30; "The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle", Anglo-Saxon Eng 12, 1-41.
• Dumville (1989) "Essex, Middle Anglia, and the Expansion of Mercia in the South Midlands". In S. Bassett (ed.) The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms 123-40
• Yorke (1993) "Fact or Fiction? The written evidence for the fifth and sixth centuries A.D." Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 6, 45-50.

• Scull, C. (1993). "Archaeology, early Anglo-Saxon society and the origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms". Anglo-Saxon Stud. Archaeol. Hist, 6. 65–82

(quite theoretical, discussing the usefulness/relevance of a big-picture model)

• Scull, C. (1992). "Before Sutton Hoo: structures of power and society in early East Anglia". In M.O.H. Carver (ed.), The age of Sutton Hoo: the seventh century in north-western Europe, 3-23. Woodbridge: Boydell

p.15 limitations of the post-collapse resurgence model.

Theoretical debate ('60s onwards): Culture history vs Culture process

• Overview in Handbook of Archaeological Theories (2009), p. 29

• Härke, H:

  (2011) "Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis", Medieval Archaeology 55, 1-28 doi:10.1179/174581711X13103897378311

DNA

Thomas Green, D Phil thesis, [1] n62 on p118:

"Weale et al, 2002: 1008–21, is a good example of such a flawed study, which was characterized by a small and very restricted sample set and a remarkable degree of historical naivety which resulted in poor models of events and a lack of awareness of how circumstances over the intervening 1500 years might have affected the results they took. So, for example, no awareness is shown of the fact that their two Welsh ‘control’ sites are in areas which medieval texts claim saw major post-Roman immigration from Ireland and southern Scotland (see, for example, Koch, 1997: xcvii–xcix; Koch, 2003); they allow for a single post-Roman migration event with Britons and Anglo-Saxons thereafter breeding at the same rate, both of which assumptions are implausible (see Thomas et al, 2006); their central England site is at the meeting point of six eighteenth- and nineteenth-century coaching roads and thus likely subject to much population churn, which they show no awareness of; and their east of England sites are all from areas where mass-migration is readily admitted anyway and, furthermore, where there was a second major immigration from the continent (the Vikings) in the intervening period. See also McEvoy et al, 2004: 699, for some further points."

McEvoy, B., Richards, M., Forster, M. and Bradley, D. G. "The Longue Durée of genetic ancestry: multiple genetic marker systems and Celtic origins on the Atlantic facade of Europe", American Journal of Human Genetics, 75 (2004), 693–702 pubmed

"A degree of genetic heterogeneity in the British Isles is apparent, at least on the Y chromosome and much more tentatively on the mtDNA, with southeastern England tending to show a greater affinity to neighboring areas of continental Europe. Anglo-Saxon mass migration has been proposed as the explanation for this pattern in Y-chromosome variation (Weale et al. 2002; Capelli et al. 2003). Such explanations may seem feasible for the Y chromosome, given the high levels of drift that might be associated with disproportionately high numbers of offspring among conquering elite males. However, the weight of archaeological evidence is against population replacement associated with the Anglo-Saxon conquest (Esmonde-Cleary 1989), suggesting that alternative explanations should be considered. It may be that the genetic landscape of southeastern Britain has been shaped by older links with the continent, perhaps during the Neolithic period or even before the filling of the North Sea, when Britain was still connected to the continent via the Doggerland plain (Coles 1998)"

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Leslie et al pubmed