Wasperton: a Roman, British and Anglo-Saxon community in central England. By Martin Carver, Catherine Hills and Jonathan Scheschkewitz. 285mm. Pp x+372, col, b&w ills. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009. ISBN 9781843834274. £60 (hbk)

摘要

All those interested in the Roman/Saxon interface in Britain will welcome publication of the excavations conducted at Wasperton, Warwickshire, in the 1980s and Martin Carver, in particular, should be congratulated on bringing out this handsome volume. This was and is a complex, multi-period landscape, with features dating from the Neolithic onwards, but the volume under review focuses solely on ‘Dark Age’ archaeology, and, in particular, on a cemetery that was receiving burials by the fourth century (at the latest) and continued in use right through the sixth – so across the cultural divide from Roman to Anglo-Saxon. The cemetery is viewed as evidence of a local community who first emerge within the late Roman milieu but then continued and became ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in terms of burial practice and material culture before the cemetery went out of use in the seventh century. Its importance lies in this sense of continuity: the vast majority of late Roman cemeteries were abandoned by ad 500, at the very latest, while Anglo-Saxon cemeteries normally began on a site not recently used for burial, though not necessarily an un-used one in other respects.