No Saxon invasion?

[authun]

Both Chris Wickham ("Framing The Early Medieval Period') and Guy Halsall (http://600transformer.blogspot.com/2011/...roman.html) have very interesting, if somewhat different takes on the situation.

They deal with the wider subject of Germanic settlement in Britain, but I can't help feeling that the question of 'what happened to the Britons?' is something that needs to be addressed. Why is it that in many areas in England, where we have no evidence for either germanic settlement or germanic influence, do we not find evidence of Britons?

That's not to say they are not there, simply what sort of life were they living which left virtually no traces? What are we missing?

As Halsall writes, large scale abandonment on the Continent was concluded from a perceived hiatus in the archaeological record. However, analysis of crop pollens have shown that there was a contraction in the settled areas, but not complete abandonment. In the map below, the yellow settled areas in the late 6th cent, have all shown contraction with forest or marsh encroaching into the previously cultivated land.



Once the pollen record showed that people still lived in the same areas, but on a reduced scale, there was an impetus to look for new evidence, and evidence for continuity was found.

Daniel Nösler of the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research writes in his paper 'Break or Tradition? Analysis of Ceramics from the Dark Ages in the Elbe-Weser Triangle':

"For the first time in northern Lower Saxony, a large-scale settlement, for which a continuous settling from the 1st to the 9th century and thus also for the so-called “settlement gap” between the 6th and 7th century has been verified, has been excavated on the geest at Loxstedt, Cuxhaven county.
......
Currently it is assumed that this area was depopulated by widespread migrations at the end of the migration period and the repopulation did not start until the 8th century. The results of multiple pollen analyses prove a decline in human settlement but no complete abandonment of the population. To shed new light on questions of the settlement continuity or the possible immigration of new population strata, test samples of settlement ceramics of the 6th/7th century were analyzed archaeometrically in cooperation with the Laboratory for Ceramic Research, University of Lund. Especially thin sections were used, which gave illuminating insights to the used raw material, the temper and the pottery style. The first preliminary results of this analysis make a continuity of the pottery tradition very likely and thus neither point to a gap in the settling nor to an immigration of new settlers."

If evidence of continuity could be found in the Elbe Weser triangle, why can't we find evidence for continuity of Britons in England? My point is that evidence for Britons living in England but not under Germanic control may yet exist, but that we haven't found it yet.

cheers
authun