Population replacement or acculturation? An archaeological perspective on population and migration in post-Roman Britain. In: H.L.C. Tristram (ed.). The Celtic Englishes III (Anglistische Forschungen, 324). Heidelberg: Winter 2003. 13-28.

Vorträge und Forschungen, 2014

When I gave my paper at Reichenau I tried to explain why it is difficult at present to produce a satisfactory synthesis of the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. In particular, I focussed on two works, which seem to me to epitomize two very different approaches to the subject, and I tried to explore the reasons for those differences. I did this because I think that theoretical and ideological perspectives are important, and that they do affect the way we select and interpret evidence for the past, although I might not go so far as R. Reece, who has recently claimed »the way that you see Britannia turning into early England is going to say far more about you ... than about Britain from AD 200 to 800« l \ The point I was trying to make was that conflicting views of how to set about interpreting the evidence for the fifth Century in Britain exist, and that the conflict sometimes seems to have inhibited research. It was not really fair to concentrate on two authors, or on the two kinds of thinking I think they represent. In fact a number of perspectives can be detected in current work, and scholars seldom fit quite so neatly into categories as I might have seemed to suggest. A second very important point which needed more emphasis is that there is a great deal of recent and current research, by scholars in various disciplines, which is relevant to our understanding of this period. The detail and volume of this work constitute another obstacle to synthesis, but offer considerable hopes for future resolution of some problems. In this paper I want to review some of the different approaches and to outline some recent work on different aspects of the problem, rather than myself attempting to offer any general account of the settlement of England by the Anglo-Saxons. At Reichenau I discussed the paper published by H. W. Böhme 2) . I also discussed the book by C. Arnold »Roman Britain to Saxon England« (London 1984). These two works seem to me to represent very different approaches to the subject, indeed to archaeology. Böhme has collected and plotted the distribution of certain categories of metalwork of late fourth and fifth Century date found in Britain. He has interpreted this in the light of historical evidence, although, as he says, he is attempting to use the archaeological material to go beyond existing

Previous anthropological investigations at Trentholme Drive, in Roman York identified an unusual amount of cranial variation amongst the inhabitants, with some individuals suggested as having originated from the Middle East or North Africa. The current study investigates the validity of this assessment using modern anthropological methods to assess cranial variation in two groups: The Railway and Trentholme Drive. Strontium and oxygen isotope evidence derived from the dentition of 43 of these individuals was combined with the craniometric data to provide information on possible levels of migration, and the range of homelands that may be represented. The results of the craniometric analysis indicated that the majority of the York population had European origins, but that 11% of the Trentholme Drive and 12% of The Railway study samples were likely of African decent. Oxygen analysis identified four incomers, three from areas warmer than the UK, and one from a cooler or more continental climate. Although based on a relatively small sample of the overall population at York, this multidisciplinary approach made it possible to identify incomers, both men and women, from across the Empire. Evidence for possible second generation migrants was also suggested. The results confirm the presence of a heterogeneous population resident in York and highlight the diversity, rather than the uniformity, of the population in Roman Britain.

2021

Present-day people from England and Wales harbour more ancestry derived from Early European Farmers (EEF) than people of the Early Bronze Age¹. To understand this, we generated genome-wide data from 793 individuals, increasing data from the Middle to Late Bronze and Iron Age in Britain by 12-fold, and Western and Central Europe by 3.5-fold. Between 1000 and 875 bc, EEF ancestry increased in southern Britain (England and Wales) but not northern Britain (Scotland) due to incorporation of migrants who arrived at this time and over previous centuries, and who were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from France. These migrants contributed about half the ancestry of Iron Age people of England and Wales, thereby creating a plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain. These patterns are part of a broader trend of EEF ancestry becoming more similar across central and western Europe in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, coincident with archaeological eviden...