My analytical framework draws on the poststructuralist semiotics of Jacques Derrida as well as Deleuzian assemblage theory to offer an alternative analysis of post-Roman funerary archaeology in Britain. Instead, I relate the appearance of this material to the transformation of civic and gender identities across the late Roman world, highlighting how the ties between the Empire and the people on its peripheries enabled the participation of the latter in such processes. I argue that we must reconsider the meaning signalled by the material objects (such as burial costume, weapons, human remains, and buildings) that have to date been labelled ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and abandon assumptions, derived even today from nationalist and colonial contexts, about how this material signals coherent ‘Germanic’ identity. It is the first historiographical assessment of modern attempts to infer ethnic identity from the archaeological record in this period.
My recently published monograph, Ethnic Identity and the Archaeology of the aduentus Saxonum, marries critical approaches to sociology, anthropology, history, archaeology, and philosophy to reconsider the migration of the Saxons to Britain and the end of Roman Britain (c. I work on the history and archaeology of the late antique and early medieval worlds, where my scholarly work meets at the intersection of two core themes: the transformation of socio-political identities in the late antique world, and the modern reception of this transformation in both scholarly and popular settings.
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