Burials, Big Data, and the “End” of Roman Britain?

This paper will present the main argument of a newly completed book manuscript, Funerary Archaeology and Communities in Fifth-Century Britain, which uses new sources to study a period without texts, c.350-550CE. This paper takes a Big Data approach to the history of fifth-century Britain, using the archaeological remains of funerary rites from ~12,000 burials across the island in order to examine to determine how its inhabitants connected to the recent past and adapted to their new circumstances after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire. To what extent did the political and economic changes of the fifth century impact the ways in which people and communities understood their relationship to each other and to the past? Where did living communities choose to bury their dead, what did they choose to place with the deceased, and how did they choose to build monuments to their loved ones’ memories?

This is a crucial step-change in how historians study this period because it removes the fifth century from our current, hind-sight arguments over how (or whether) Roman Britain collapsed. My book argues that fifth-century communities did not define themselves in terms of distinct cultural or ethnic identities, and that there was no universal response to either the withdrawal of the Roman administration in Britain or the arrival of new people from the continent. Rather, the veneer of standardized Roman identity and funerary rites in Britain gave way to local practices, community cemeteries, and distinctly personal burials, all of which drew from an increasingly diverse spectrum of social structures, religious beliefs, and cultural backgrounds, and none of which were necessarily determined by one’s status as native or newcomer. I am reading, in the ground and from their perspective, the ways in which people living in fifth-century Britain told their own history.