| dc.description.abstract | [Introduction] The transition from Roman Britain to medieval England
has traditionally been studied using a very limited range
of documentary sources, and an archaeological record
that is at best patchy in its regional coverage and until
recently was dominated by funerary evidence.
Discussion has, therefore, been dominated by socio-political
issues of continuity, conquest, colonisation and
acculturation as seen through the relationship between the
native Romano-British population and the Anglo-Saxon
immigrants. The scarcity of sources, and socio-political
focus of this discussion, has resulted in debate being at a
highly generalised level, with
only, very limited consideration of the extent to which there were local
differences in how these processes operated. This paper adopts a very different approach in that it starts with the premise that because there was considerable regional
variation in the landscape character of Roman Britain,
and considerable regional variation in the landscape
character of medieval England, there is likely to have
been considerable regional variation in the nature of the
transition between the two. There is a need to study
landscape evolution at the local scale, though the scarcity
of distinctive material culture in many regions makes this
difficult. It has traditionally been thought that using
palaeoenvironmental evidence was similarly limited due
to a lack of suitable peat sequences, though this paper
aims to show that a shift in focus away from upland
blanket mires, whose location remote from areas that
were actually settled at the time makes them largely
irrelevant to the majority of Roman Britain, towards
small lowland valley and spring mires within areas that
were occupied does have the potential to shed new light
on the end of that period. | en_GB |
