Wasperton: A Roman, British, and Anglo-Saxon Community in Central England by Martin Carver, Catherine Hills, Jonathan Scheschkewitz (review)

REVIEWS 240 Martin Carver, Catherine Hills, and Jonathan Scheschkewitz, Wasperton: A Roman, British, and Anglo-Saxon Community in Central England (Woodbridge : Boydell Press 2009) 384 pp. This volume marks the culmination of three decades of archaeological, historical , and scientific investigation of the cemetery at Wasperton in the Avon valley of central England, which was in use from the fourth through the seventh centuries. The principle contributors are archaeologists, but research performed by material culture scholars, chemists, isotope and radiocarbon specialists, osteoarchaeologists , and metallurgists are all incorporated into the larger scope of the study. While the volume is more a reference than a monograph, it has much to offer students of late-Roman and post-Roman Britain. Wasperton is comprised of two parts. The first contains the researchers’ analysis of the Wasperton site in six chapters. Martin Carver’s first chapter unpacks the scope of the study—the creation of a viable sequence of all of the graves in the cemetery at Wasperton while noting the cultural affiliation of the material goods left there. The second chapter describes the course of the archaeological work in the 1980s that became the basis of John Scheschkewitz’s preliminary studies of the site, which this volume in turn improves and expands . In the third chapter, the authors explain the situation of the cemetery, its prehistoric agricultural use, and the physical characteristics of the graves. The fourth, on the human and material remains, incorporates summaries (along with the location of the full studies) of ancillary studies of the assemblages by experts in textiles, metallurgy, osteoarchaeology, radiocarbon dating, and isotope analysis. In the fifth chapter, Carver constructs the full sequence of burials. The choice here to rely on stratification as the primary means of establishing dating means that this sequence has been constructed independently of historical context , allowing it to be tested against historical context in the final chapter. This last chapter situates Wasperton as a scene of population movement and cultural contact throughout the period, and applies the study to common historical questions of migration, conversion, and contact. The second part, comprising fully half of the book, is a catalogue of each of the burials at Wasperton. Catalogue entries include the location, size, depth, and type of inhumation, as well as each burial’s location in the sequence. Beyond this, the catalogue includes illustrations of the burial, the position of the human remains, their orientation, and the type of construction used in the grave. Artifacts are catalogued, described, and illustrated for each of the inhumations . In short, the catalogue is a wealth of information for mortuary, funerary , and material culture practices in the Wasperton sequence. Students of early medieval Britain, material culture, cultural history, or burial rites will find this well-assembled cemetery sequence useful as a reference. As a reference for historians of early medieval Britain, this volume has much to recommend it. In the first place, it is unabashedly not a work of history , and this is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of the work. The authors have constructed their study in such a way as to avoid hanging archaeological conclusions on historical narratives, ceding that “the changes that occur in cemeteries in early medieval Britain have been attributed to a number of favorite causes: Anglo-Saxon immigration, population displacement (of Briton by Saxon), genetic conquest (of Briton by Saxon), coexistence between the two REVIEWS 241 and conversion to Paganism or to Christianity (of Briton by Saxon, or vice versa). The frustration of using cemeteries to advance this argument is that cemeteries may not be playing by the rules” (139). The alternative employed here is the creation of a narrative solely on the archaeological evidence that they then place in dialogue with other scholars. The result is a work that guides the reader through the intricacies of archaeology and its limitations in trying to answer the kinds of questions that historians have resolutely been pressing it for. That said, the detailed studies and wealth of information in the catalogue have only been employed here to create the sequence; it contains a wealth of information that historians of Britain might employ. As a work of meticulous archaeological scholarship, Wasperton is at times a...