Ethnic Identity and the Archaeology of the Aduentus Saxonum. A Modern Framework and its Problems

This monograph, being the revised publication of Harland’s doctoral thesis, exposes and vigorously contests the ethnic paradigm in early Anglo-Saxon archaeology, argued here to be the principal logos in archaeological interpretations of the 5th and 6th centuries AD, used at once to explain and describe material behavioural phenomena at a fundamental level. Much of the book consists of historiographical critique, but substantial space also goes to re-imagining the material record outside readings of ethnic difference, as well as presenting a poststructuralist framework for the evaluation and restructuring of interpretation. Following an introductory chapter describing the fraught present-day political context of the early medieval past, Chapter 2 presents an historiographical critique of how archaeologists working with the 5th and 6th centuries have invoked ethnicity. Harland argues that archaeology has been insufficiently influenced by developments in the anthropology and sociology of ethnicity, giving rise to his key contention that the material record alone will never be sufficient to empirically determine a phenomenon that has no necessary physical component. In seeking to help remedy such deficiency Harland’s view of interpretative areas being ‘out of bounds’ for archaeology will certainly raise the hackles of historic and prehistoric archaeologists alike (particularly where the archaeology of identity is concerned) – though Harland is unbending on this point. Chapter 3 presents a poststructuralist framework for evaluating existing work, largely using Derrida as a de-constructive force and, later, Deleuze and Guattari as the re-constructive remedies. The philosophical framing is inventive and most welcome, presenting explicitly Harland’s reasoning, which is indeed followed to the letter and with clarity. Chapter 4 rigorously applies this method to an historiographical sample of work from the 1980s onwards, plainly demonstrating the prevalence of the ethnic paradigm, as well as exposing its empirical shortcomings. Chapters 5 and 6 reconsider the material evidence on Harland’s terms (sans the ethnic logos), presenting case studies of ceramics, brooches and furnished inhumation, to refresh this canonical material. A final chapter summarises the argument and looks ahead rather more optimistically to the future of the discipline. This book pursues an unswerving argument, highly attentive to the epistemological detail, but not always balanced, and with a tendency to overstate exceptional cases in the archaeological record and weaknesses in existing work. Accordingly, it does not always do justice to the subtler aspects of the historiography, and a critique of this book as unforgiving as Harland’s own would reveal minor slips when it comes to the archaeological detail. However, once past this, the principal critique is both compelling and invigorating. Harland never disputes the impact migration may have had on material behaviours, nor does he deny that ethnicity may have played a role in the 5th and 6th centuries; it is the archaeological investigation of this with the available data that he excoriates. As DNA analysis gathers pace, the field will benefit from Harland’s exposure of the weaknesses in archaeological inferences of ethnicity in the material record or assumptions of its presence from the outset. Yet, excluding ethnicity from investigation altogether, as Harland would have it, is a proposal unlikely to be adopted widely as orthodoxy. More than anything, this volume makes it quite clear why it is important to provide theoretical clarity when it comes to the use of ethnicity and ethnonyms. Beyond these matters, the alternative interpretations offered are interesting and could probably be incorporated into existing narratives with more ease than is implied. Beneath the scolding tone there is an erudite and imaginative argument, which I expect will find a more receptive audience than Harland imagined.