The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Early historic Britain
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In Anglo-Saxon England, the situation is different. Many settlements are known, although
often only from air photographs, as scatters of pottery from field survey, or from limited
rescue excavations. Several sites have been extensively excavated, including West Stow in Suffolk,
Mucking in Essex and West Heslerton in Yorkshire (Welch 1992, chs 2 and 3). The visibility of
Anglo-Saxon settlements is partly caused by a commonly found type known as the Grubenhaus,
or sunken featured building. The pit that characterizes this type of building usually produces a
rich deposit of occupation debris: pottery, artefacts and animal bones. Earlier interpretations
of these pits suggested that the Anglo-Saxons lived in squalor in holes in the ground full of
rubbish, but more recently, partly as a result of experimental reconstructions at West Stow,
they have been explained as underfloor spaces, essentially cellars, for storage and insulation,
underneath perfectly habitable thatched wooden houses. Much of the material found in the
pits therefore does not relate directly to the use of the building but represents later rubbish put
there after it had gone out of use and been demolished. Grubenhaeuser were subsidiary buildings
with a variety of domestic and industrial uses, while the most important buildings were larger
rectangular ‘halls’ that did not have cellars.
At Mucking and West Stow, it has been argued that the settlements consisted of groups of
farms that shifted their locations over time, because there is some chronological variation in the
distribution of the finds. Even Mucking, therefore, which looks quite large on the site plan, was
no more than a village, because the whole excavated area was not in use at any single point in
time. At West Heslerton, however, it appears that the settlement was functionally and not
chronologically zoned, with spatial separation of different activities and people. In some areas,
industrial activities were carried out in or near Grubenhaeuser, whereas in others there were only
‘halls’, and elsewhere animal pens. On this model, the whole site was in use during at least parts
of its existence, with a planned layout that the excavator describes as closer to a town than a
village. The Anglo-Saxon occupation of West Heslerton is being investigated as part of research
into the long-term use of the region. It succeeded settlements on the other side of the valley that
were occupied through the Roman period and into the fifth century. The new location is explained
partly in terms of alterations in land ownership and political control, which could have been
connected with take-over by incoming Anglo-Saxons, but need not have represented wholesale
replacement of the population. The underlying Roman structures may also have given the site
some local significance, and influenced its siting.
Grubenhaeuser appear on the Continent before they arrive in Britain. Like cremation burials,
they are usually taken as an indication of Germanic immigrants, but it is not clear why this type
of building was developed on the Continent, where it is found as early as the second century in
The Netherlands. It may have had as much to do with changing climate and agricultural regimes
as with population movements. The main house type in use in northern Europe was the longhouse,
a narrow, aisled timber building that had accommodation for humans at one end and animal stalls
at the other. The absence of this kind of building from early Anglo-Saxon settlements in England
is one of the strongest arguments against a simple replacement of Briton by immigrant Saxon.
The rectangular buildings that do occur on Anglo-Saxon sites have a distinctive plan: they are
near to double-squares, with opposed doors in the middle of the long sides and a narrow partition
at one end. Both Romano-British and continental ancestry has been plausibly claimed for this
building type.
There is some regional variation amongst settlement sites, not unlike that apparent in the
burial record, in that Grubenhaeuser are more numerous in eastern England, whereas south of
the Thames, at sites such as Chalton in Hampshire, ‘halls’ predominate. This may be partly due
to a difference in date, in that earlier settlements seem to be found in the east, but this is
difficult to demonstrate since sites that do not include Grubenhaeuser produce fewer finds and