Chaussée, Scott Martin; (2022) A Landscape Archaeology of Communities in Early Medieval Sussex. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This thesis examines the material reflections of community identity and the dynamics of social change in the post-Roman southern Britain, with special reference to the area which would later become the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdom of Sussex. Sussex was an important zone of socio-political interaction in south-eastern England, but the nature of its political transformation from a Roman civitas territory into an Anglo-Saxon kingdom was, until now, poorly understood. This doctoral research has brought together, for the first time, reinterpretations of published archaeological literature and new datasets derived from a novel combination of settlement, cemetery, and chancefind sources. A multi-scalar, geospatial approach is applied to produce original diachronic and qualitative distributional analyses of key artefact classes (coinage and portable metalwork) and micro-scale multivariate analyses of individual cemetery sites. The discussion synthesises the results of these analyses, examining the apparent patterns and explains them within their broader archaeological context. The key results indicate that the use of identity-signalling objects and behaviours appear to reflect diverse cultural influences, but not a specific ethnicity. Moreover, from the mid-seventh century, emergent supra-local elite communities and the introduction of Christianity brought with them new ways of demonstrating social power and territorialising the landscape. Crucially, incipient royal and ecclesiastical elite communities oriented towards the Continent within a transformed, post-Roman North Sea network. The coinage and metalwork analyses reveal the emergence of several areas of exchange along the Channel coast, as well as a generalised engagement with long-distance exchange among coastal communities. Competitive exclusion and warfare were predicated on access and control of these networks in the ninth century which ultimately cost the kingdom of Sussex its independence. First to Mercia, then to Wessex. Through the lens of socio-political interaction and kingdom formation, this research finally addresses the strategies communities pursue in mediating themselves, their lives, their descendants, and their ancestors in the world.

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