Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract

Abstract This book examines how Anglo-Saxon communities perceived and used prehistoric monuments across the period AD 400–1100. Using a range of sources including archaeological, historical, art historical, and literary, the variety of ways in which the early medieval population of England used the prehistoric legacy in the landscape is explored from temporal and geographic perspectives. Key to the arguments and ideas presented is the premise that populations used these remains, intentionally and knowingly, in the articulation and manipulation of their identities: local, regional, political and religious. The book takes the reader via seven chapters, from the early to the late Anglo-Saxon world touching on funerary ritual, domestic and settlement evidence, ecclesiastical sites, place-names, and written sources, administrative and judicial geographies. Through a thematic and, in part, chronologically structured examination of Anglo-Saxon uses and perceptions of the prehistoric, this book demonstrates that populations were not only concerned with Romanitas, but that a similar curiosity and conscious reference to and use of the prehistoric existed within all strata of society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.