No Saxon invasion?

[Caballo]

Authun wrote "Elmet is interesting in this respect. It is in the east but there is no anglo saxon archaeology before the 8th cent. and even then the first archaeology is ecclesiastical in nature. Unfortunately, we have little in the way of archaeology of the Britons of Elmet either and nothing to tell us about how they were living. They don't appear to have adopted an anglo saxon material culture and we are simply left with a hiatus.

It's a puzzling situation because we can find charred hazelnuts, flints and camp fires going back to the mesolithic. Axes heads and quern stones from the neolithic are still lying around. A lot of roman archaeology exists, coins, tiles etc but nothing that is sub roman. As an example of post roman Britain untouched by the Anglo Saxons, it ought to give us a lot of information about the nature of a British community. Sadly, it doesn't."

Bryan Ward- Perkins points out this absence of evidence as evidence in its own right for the economic collapse of Britain in the 5th century- where the country went from 4th century cow-byres with tiles to the entire absence of wheel-thrown pottery in the late 5th century. Building becomes organic- and much harder to spot,