Lineage, genealogy and landscape: a high-resolution archaeological model for the emergence of supra-local society from early medieval England

Abstract

This paper considers the socio-political implications of a series of closely spatially and temporally related early medieval cemeteries from England and how they might be read as charting the emergence of both individual communities and of collective supra-local society. The case study is from early post-Roman Britain in a region that during the sixth century AD became the historically documented Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. Four distinct communities appropriated an earlier burial landscape, arguably by a process of negotiation, reflecting the formation of a small-scale, supra-local society based around a site of occasional gathering. A key notion is that periodic gathering and local stability could be core features of large-scale polity formation. Overall, a case is made for the long-term cohesion of a local territory, reliant on an ancient mode of social organization.

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