Although I had planned to write about my trip to Scotland in this week’s Darkage-ology, I’m afraid the unexpectedly soon publication of my first major article has diverted my attention. The paper is published in The Antiquaries Journal.

Feel free to take a look at the article here.

The paper is a reanalysis of a late fifth- or early sixth-century artefact assemblage discovered at Hardown Hill in Dorset during the First World War. The excavation was prompted by the finding of an iron spearhead by a boy hunting rabbits in the low mounds that characterise the flat-topped hill.

The location of Hardown Hill (©Cambridge University Press 2014)

The objects, fifteen in total, were described in Wyatt Wingrave’s report of 1931 and reconsidered by Vera Evison in 1968. Despite finding no evidence of human remains, both scholars considered the objects to be grave-goods and so a funerary interpretation has stood ever since. I thought this was unconvincing, so I set out to reconsider the assemblage.

The publication of a new typo-chronological scheme (effectively a framework for dating artefacts) gave me the necessary tools to reclassify the objects. By taking precise measurements of the artefacts I was able to determine their class.

An incredibly useful and relatively cheap volume.

Taken together, these data were then added to a correspondence analysis of 272 fifth- to seventh-century grave assemblages to determine where they fit within the seriation of dateable graves. It’s pretty complicated stuff, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of John Hines (my old supervisor) who kindly lent me the dataset of the aforementioned publication and helped me run the analysis.

The typological and chronological reanalysis of the artefacts confirmed a date-range of about AD 450 to AD 550, although a date within the latter part of the range is statistically more likely. In order to contextualise the finds, I compared the Hardown Hill assemblage to the available fifth- to seventh-century material in the county of Dorset. In doing so, it became apparent that the assemblage from Hardown Hill is fairly unique in post-Roman Dorset and more than double the size of the similarly important but neglected assemblage from Spetisbury Rings. The assemblage, then, is something of an enigma; relatively early in date, large in size and out of place in the local and national distributions of early Anglo-Saxon material culture.

The latter part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of whether the assemblage can be considered funerary or not. I argue that the balance of evidence (including contextual and environmental information) favours interpreting the artefacts not as grave-goods but instead as the contents of a hoard. I therefore conclude that it seems most likely that a community came into contact with the objects, in either an arranged or an unplanned manner, and it was decided to store them for safekeeping until their presumably planned, but not actioned, retrieval.

A 500 word summary of a 6,000 word article is tough, so if you want to know more I suggest you give the article a little read! I’ve attached the published summaries (in English, German and French) below.