Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

324 12. land, labour and settlement
seen, demographic decline is presumed to have begun much later; but here
too, after 542 or at the latest in the seventh century, it is normally thought
that the population dropped considerably, perhaps even dramatically.
In the absence of good written records, we are basically dependent on
the archaeological evidence for these impressions of a falling population.
However, this evidence is deeply problematic. Archaeology, and fieldsurvey
in particular, finds people through their durable material objects. If
people owned abundant and readily recognizable things that survive well in
the soil (as they did in the Roman west, and in the fifth- and sixth-century
east), then the population shows up well in the modern landscape, as scatters
of tile and pottery, or even as mosaics, silver treasures and standing
ruins.
However, excavation has shown that both fifth- and sixth-century
westerners and seventh-century Byzantines generally lived in much less
imposing and more ‘biodegradable’ surroundings than their Roman predecessors:
with pottery that is less abundant and more difficult to identify
than that of the preceding periods; in houses that were often of perishable
materials; and with the public buildings and churches of former ages,
rather than with new ones. All this means that post-Roman people can
easily escape surface-detection. 17 For instance, the great sixth/seventhcentury
royal estate-centre and rural palace at Yeavering in Northumbria
(termed by Bede a villa regia) was a settlement from the very top of the social
pyramid and was home to perhaps hundreds of people; but it was built
entirely of wood and other perishable materials and, despite full and meticulous
excavation, produced only small quantities of pottery, all of it friable
and close in colour to the soil. 18 The site of Yeavering was discovered
through the good fortune that its post-holes and ditches showed up well in
air-photography. It is a sobering but important realization for those interested
in the history of post-Roman population levels that, without this,
Yeavering might well have escaped even careful field-survey. By contrast, a
tiny Roman farmstead, home to perhaps only ten individuals from much
lower down the social ladder, will normally be readily spotted, dated and
plotted on the archaeological map from the evidence of its pottery. There
is no constant correlation between the number of archaeological sites
detected and the number of sites that once existed; rather, the discoveryrate
of sites will vary according to the nature of each period’s material
culture.
Nor, even when we have detected the sites, is there a constant multiplier
that can be applied in order to move from identified dwellings to the
number of people who lived in them. Modern experience shows that in
17 For the details: ch. 13,pp.350,62 below. For discussion of this archaeological problem: Lewit
(1991) 37–46; Millett (1991). 18 Hope-Taylor (1977) 170–200 and plates 3 and 4.
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