Introduction Down a Rabbit Hole? But, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.--Lewis Carroll, Alice''s Adventures in Wonderland I am a historian, not an archaeologist, but almost two decades ago, as I settled into a new book project--I was writing the early medieval volume of the Penguin History of Britain --I began reading archaeology seriously for the first time in my career. Like most early medieval historians, until this point I had spent the bulk of my time wrestling with the shortcomings of texts written in the early Middle Ages. Almost all the sources describing Britain''s first hundred years after Rome were written not in the fourth or fifth centuries, but rather in the eighth century and beyond. The authors of these retrospective texts framed the past in ways that would have made sense to contemporary audiences, especially their twin assumptions that Anglo-Saxon kings and their war bands were the period''s only historical actors and that these men had rapidly taken power in lowland Britain after Rome''s withdrawal. Three consecutive entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle will suffice to illustrate how this plays out in our sources: In the year 495, two chieftains, Cerdic and his son Cynric, came with five ships to Britain at the place which is called Cerdicesora , and they fought against the Britons on the same day. In the year 501, Port and his two sons Bieda and Mægla came to Britain with two ships at the place which is called Portsmouth, and there they killed a British man of very high rank.

In the year 508 Cerdic and Cynric killed a British king, whose name was Natanleod, and 5,000 men with him; and the land right up to Charford was called Netley after him. Although the Chronicle ''s portrayal of the past doubtless rang true to the better sorts of people living at the time of its compilation, there are good reasons for thinking that we should be more skeptical. One of the things I learned, as I plowed through the stacks of excavation reports on my desk, is that the mass of contemporary evidence--which is material rather than textual--strongly argues that people in lowland Britain in the fifth century were much more concerned with subsistence agriculture than warfare, and that almost all of them lived in highly circumscribed worlds in ranked rather than steeply hierarchical communities. My reading also brought home the fact that most individuals and households during the first four or five generations after Rome''s fall were closer to poor than rich, not something one gleans from a close reading of Bede or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . This fundamental fact is missing from our interpretations of the period, not only because we historians often limit ourselves to the study of texts produced by and for elite men, but because most of us are not fully aware of the material prosperity found in Britain before Rome''s fall. I came to learn from my reading of archaeology that the people living in this period who were not weapon-bearing men engaged with the world and its problems in ways that would be fundamental in Britain''s eventual transformation from Roman to early medieval, but that most of the important work they undertook never appears in annals, histories, or saints'' lives. As I puzzled my way through the archaeology, I was surprised by how much evidence there was for those great crowds of people mostly missing from our texts--women, children, farm families, part-time craftspeople--in other words, the kinds of individuals who actually made up the overwhelming majority of all those living in lowland Britain. It was the collective actions of these people, that is, the ones who generally have no place in either our early medieval texts or our modern historical treatments of the period, that stood behind many of the period''s most crucial transformations.

My reading of the material evidence also suggested that on the whole historians and archaeologists of Anglo-Saxon England have not thought hard enough about Britain''s large, indigenous population once the "Anglo-Saxons" arrive on the scene. In most treatments, the indigenous population either rapidly exits stage left or is cast as the losers in an epic saga of one ethnic group''s triumph over another. As a result, native British peoples'' part in the story of the making of early medieval England has not been well served, in spite of the fact that several million of them lived through the generations of transition. The day these various realizations finally sank in marks the day that I threw myself headfirst into the archaeological literature and what I feared to be a great, gaping rabbit hole. What I learned, instead, was that it was not a rabbit hole at all, but rather an immensely complicated and revelatory space. Indeed, as I finished this book on the late Roman material culture regime in Britain at its end, it is clear that I am never going to claw my way back out of the evidentiary world into which I have fallen. Not only have I established permanent residence down here, but I hope that my book and I can lure other historians down the rabbit hole with us, so that we can show them the kinds of things one can see down here that one cannot see anywhere else. Romanists and Medievalists/Historians and Archaeologists Reading works in archaeology brought home the profound structural and conceptual divisions between scholars specializing in Roman Britain and those who study early medieval Britain.

The two groups, for the most part, inhabit different intellectual worlds, each one with its own historiography, period-specific journals, and professional conferences, as well as separate bodies of evidence, burning questions, and enemy camps. Exacerbating this divide is the fact that most scholars working on Roman Britain concentrate their efforts on the earlier part of their period, while those studying Anglo-Saxon England labor, for the most part, in the latter half of theirs. And few specialists are sufficiently familiar with both the before and the after to think constructively across the two periods. Because 400 CE marks both the beginning and the end of a period, questions for scholars working on one side of the divide are rarely carried over by scholars laboring on the other side. For example, many Roman-period archaeologists have participated in a productive, decades-long discussion of a constellation of issues that fall under the much-contested term "Romanization," that is, the impact of Roman material culture on Britain''s native population in its four hundred years under empire. Questions revolving around ways Roman objects were made, distributed, and used, and how Roman-style material culture affected identity and lifeways in Britain sit at the heart of much of what has been written in the field. And yet the impact of the disappearance of Roman-style material culture in the later fourth and fifth centuries is virtually absent in the scholarship. Indeed, with the change of period comes a change of personnel.

Early medieval archaeologists are much more interested in questions revolving around migration and ethnicity. Because of this, many of the material changes we see in the period are attributed to the arrival of new people with new ideas. On the other hand, questions related to the effects of what one might call "de-Romanization" are rarely asked. That evidence actually dating from the long fifth century challenges the picture painted by our retrospective written sources will come as no surprise to historians. But if Roman and early medieval specialists inhabit different planets, historians and archaeologists live in different galaxies. With a few happy exceptions, most historians are not as familiar as they should be with the large amounts of evidence unearthed by archaeologists, especially that explicated in the more technical and scientific portions of site reports. And hardly any are aware of the riches buried in gray literature--the tens of thousands of unpublished reports that few historians know exist, much less read. So, although a few historians have made good use of the data unearthed and explicated by archaeologists, most have not, and the fifth century, with its few late and lapidary written sources, has yet to receive sufficient attention from historians.

At the same time, many archaeologists have incorporated older historical paradigms or treatments of texts long abandoned by historians into their interpretations, and they have used them to build the interpretive scaffolding on which to hang the archaeological evidence. This book attempts to bridge the intellectual and academic barriers just described. Histories of Britain with a date range of 300 CE-525 CE are rarely written. The years 300-400 are dealt with in histories of Roman Britain, and those falling after 400 are found in volumes on early medieval history, although most histories of the early medieval period, in actual fact, begin in 500 rather than 400. Historians of the period do not write books based on material culture. That is what archaeologists do. Finally, the bulk of scholars working on early medieval Britain in this period concentrate their efforts on either "Anglo-Saxons" or "Britons." I, however, am not particularly interested in either, because I do not think that there were large enough affinities of people knocking up against one another in this early period for ethnic identities to.