Appearence and tactics of early 5th century Saxons.

[Robert Vermaat]

I think you've answered your own question, here, Robert 8)
The British, Iron-Age Celt and the Anglo-Saxon graves you describe are
centuries apart, separated by 4/500 years of Romanised burial culture.
That is why it cannot be a continuation. And what the grave goods
do show is that you have a similar 'warrior-culture' at both ends of Roman
Britain, in the form of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, respectively.

Hi Mike, best read all the posts. On August 3 I refuted that:

Ah, but there you are wrong, this gap does not exist. Take, for instance, Six Hills at Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and the Bartlow Hills at Ashdon, Essex. I also know of several in East Kent, two near Birchington, two more near the east coast farmsteads at Broadstairs and Dumpton, and another near Manston Aerodrome. These are all mound burials from the Roman period.

Sure, chamber burials are found on each side on the Roman period, but inhumation burials or tumuli burials are not.

There is always going to be some continuation. But that is
not to ignore the changes. As they say: 'The Devil is in the details!'
Raedwald is right. And Dr. Heinrich Harke (whom I know you know of)
puts it very succinctly: We know that the coastal lands were abandoned
in Frisia, Anglia & Jutland at this time. If the migrants did not arrive in
Britain, then there must be many thousands of longships at the bottom
of the North Sea :lol:

Again, Mike, I answered this to Redwald before, July 28:

settlements were abandoned, sure, but where in the past it was automatically assumed that the folks took ship to Britain, nowadays we are more careful. Maybe they built new houses at another spot, close by or some distance away> It is very common for settlements to 'move' that way. But in the past it was the chicken and the egg: the folks went so they had to join the invasion, and the invasions happened because the folks seemed to be gone.

Which would be a safe place where you would be safe from proving where the went. But so far, no massive waves of 5th-c. Germanic immigrants have been attested. Those who come into the island, seem to have done so at leisure, not in massive waves. The West Hestlerton case nicely shows that. Härke assumes, as so many did earlier, that the settlements were emptied by folks who took ship for Britain. But they did not leave notes about their whereabouts, did they? It’s a fact that no research was done about continuation of settlements nearby, maybe on higher ground.

Look, I’ll say it again and again – if you’re meaning to attack my position that there were no immigrations you’re barking up the wrong tree-that is NOT my position. My position is against those who advocate a mass migration, emptying of lands on the other side of the North Sea, and the mass displacement of the natives, or their extinction.

It's not 'racist' to prefer your own material culture to that
of an invader/migrant. That's simply a matter of personal preference.
It's especially not racist to resent being invaded :roll: As for preferring
quality over lack of quality, would it also be 'racist' for you to prefer a high quality BMW to a Lada?

Not at all, but it is racist to assume that Britons could not possibly have wanted to prefer Anglo-Saxon culture over their own, which is what is implied by those who maintain that everywhere remains of that culture are found, an immigrant must be assumed.
Btw, I would not be so sure that Anglo-Saxon culture was like 'a Lada', when compared to the post-Roman culture of the British, which I would compare the 'a BMW'. Well, maybe a rusty 1970s model.

If what you say holds water, then why did the Anglo-Saxons not immediately drop their culture for the apparently superior Romano-British culture?

Because the Roman soldiers adopting 'Germanic style' buckles
in the 4th/5th c. were doing so out of choice or practicality. They were
not being forced to adopt them by invading Germanic peoples. Whilst
at the same time, they still retained established 'Roman' equipment or
fashions, such as crossbow-brooches.

Exactly! Free choice and practicality! Exactly what is advocated in the 'acculturisation' model - no Saxon forced anyone to do anything, but the natives liked what they saw - that had been going on for centuries when it comes to fashion and other Germanic influences. And indeginous items also remained - how about those grinders that were part of Romano-British food preparation and that continue to turn up even when the household seems to have become an Anglo-Saxon one? Apparently the natives were scared off but asked how they prepared their food just before that.

But for British women to suddenly drop all their old cultural modes of dress/jewellery does not sound realistic. If they weren't actually Saxon women, but British, then why not retain some of their own 'Celtic' or Roman styles of dress alongside the 'adoptive'
Saxon ones?

No-one says anything about suddenly. All this what we're discussing here is a gradual process, beginning sometimes during the Late Roman period and sometimes ending not before the 8th century. As for jewellery, that had started to come in already during the 3rd c., no one mentions a sudden change. But I can well imagine that avilabilty changed, with trade route to the Roman Empire closing and those to the North Sea regions growing stronger.

But these new weapons being brought in by Germanic traders - how are these supposed to get past the 'customs officials'?
Are traders in Roman Britain allowed to import arms into the country?
And are civilians allowed to buy them? I don't think so.

Mike, we're talking about a timeframe when those customs officials had all long gone home to Rome.

Highly unlikely, Robert. Gildas criticises the Britons for many things in the mid-6th c. but paganism isn't one of them. 8) As for the paganism of the Saxons, they all seem to have shared the same gods (especially Woden) from placename evidence. And we know that they weren't converted to Christianity till 597 onwards, and even then it was a slow and fitful process.

Gildas wrote at a time when a reversion to paganism would still be in it’s early stages, don’t you think? Besides, if he indeed wrote in the North or the West of Britain, that would put him far away from the regions in the Southeast that we’re talking about. And of course, by far not all Britons changed their faith - not all were Christian (at least more than nominally) and as Ken Dark advocated, many Christians were still to be found in ‘Anglo-Saxon lands’ before 597.