A Well-Married Landscape: Networks of Association and 6th-Century Communities on the Isle of Wight

That women are by and large ‘hidden from history’ is an obvious statement, a consequence of texts being produced for purposes from which, it is inferred, they were uninvolved in or excluded from or at least did not have their contribution acknowledged.1 To quote Gillian Clarke “We are, as usual, trying to interrogate the writings and artefacts of men for information it never occurred to them to give.”2 Accordingly, to find women in the past from historical sources, one has to read beyond the small volume of evidence to establish, beyond a few named individuals, the existence of the female population. Whilst it would be tedious to reiterate and bewail the masculinist content of the king lists and other documents from that period, Barbara Yorke’s work on the early AngloSaxon kingdoms raises one’s hopes that meaningful lives of contemporary women can be illuminated. By aligning feminist perspectives on archaeology with approaches from social geography in conceptualising space, place and gender,3 and considering elements of the archaeological record as a form of social network, different perceptions of the cultural dynamics of the mid-first millennium ad might be foregrounded. An appraisal of source material is required, both 7th-century historical and earlier archaeological, in order to tease out aspects of attitudes to and the position of women in the sixth century in Britain. This paper was prompted by two factors: firstly, Barbara Yorke’s presentation on the mid-6th-century female from Chessell Down grave 45 at the ucl Institute of Archaeology conference, Women’s Work: Archaeology and the Invisible Sex (2000). This encouraged me to reflect that by acknowledging my wariness regarding historical sources, a reappraisal of the intersections with archaeological research would be fruitful. Secondly, her comments on the role of women in the power struggles and strategies in the formation of the Kentish kingdom,