 Ok, ddod y bydd ychydig yn ei wneud ar y sefyllfa gwagwch. Felly wedi bod yn ddweud ei wneud y dyfodol ar y rhan o unrhyw gweithio'r ysgol o mynd i meddwl a'r mynd i meddwl cyffredinol, a ydy pob meddwl cyffredinol, rydyn ni'n amlwg yma sydd arweithio'r gweithio, sydd eich cyfweithio ar ein bod yn unedol We've completed more than 2,000 one-metre-square test fit excavations. You can see the distribution of them mostly in eastern England here. The aim of the project was to try and reconstruct the long-term development of the non-deserted settlements, the currently occupied rural settlements that are still inhabited today, where it's generally very difficult to carry out any archaeological excavation, and obviously it's not possible to do field walking or aerial photography or anything like that. The aim was really to look at the long-term development, really focusing on the periods from 800 onwards, but there's a particular phenomenon to do with the Roman material, which I've become increasingly slightly puzzled and intrigued by, which then relates to the theme of this settlement, the early medieval transition. So this is what one of these test pits looks like. They are all dug by different people. It's been a big public archaeology project, but the methodology has been very standardised. The test pits are dug in 10 centimetres fits. All the spoil is sieved through 10 millimetre mesh sieves, and the fines from each spit, we give each spit a separate context number. The fines from each context are kept separately. The main material we've used for analysis has been the pottery because it's most widespread and it's essentially ubiquitous in eastern England. We have a continuous pottery sequence, effectively actually from the Neolithic, but I'm not going to talk about the Priestsloric at all. But we do have the benefit of a reasonably continuous pottery sequence, though in fact the early and middle Anglesapson period, between about the 5th century and the 9th, does have very much less pottery turning up, but we do have pottery at that time. So I'm just going to show you a couple of the sites that we've looked at in detail to show how this works. So this is Pyrton in North Hartfordshire. It's just here on the map. As you can see from helpful Google Earth, it's a nucleated village. All the settlement today is concentrated in one area, very centrally within the parish, where the parish boundary is shown on the map there. Test pits we've excavated here are shown, as you can see. I would point out they are not shown to scale. Shame really, because it would have been very, very informative if we'd been able to make everyone about 100 metres squared, but sadly not. But as you can see, we have covered a fair area of the settlement. And what we've done, of course, is then look at the dates of the pottery from the different test pits, and we can show the distribution of these. So in these maps, the test pits are very each for different dates, as you can see from the top right-hand corner. The test pits which didn't produce any pottery of that date are shown as white squares, blank white squares. The test pits which did produce pottery of that date are shown as circles. And as you can see from the key on the left-hand side, the larger, the more pottery, the bigger the circle, as you might expect. The distinction between grey and black simply refers to the pottery that's found with later material mixed in with it, and pottery that's found in undisturbed contexts. I was initially quite concerned about the possibility of recent gardening and building and stuff moving spoil around and introducing finds that shouldn't be there or shouldn't be down to the earlier development of the settlement. But actually, I don't think this is generally a problem, but we've sort of got in the habit of showing the disturbed and undisturbed context differently. So that's the grey and black. So I sort of broadly ignore that. So what we've got here is the background prayer story, which I said I wasn't going to talk about, but again to the nile, because one or two pits have produced their sherd or two. Similarly, from the Bronze Age, it was a little bit of a cluster in the middle. Into the Iron Age, we've got a few pits that are showing in the centre of the village, but again, it's very little. It's difficult to make much sense of it. I'm not a prayer historian. I'm not really working on this material. When we get into the Roman period, though, we see something quite different showing up. And we can see very clearly, we've definitely got a concentration of test pits. We do see Romano-British material run period pottery from this area, and a smaller and less concentrated cluster in this area. Here, it's a shame ring that in person we haven't been able to dig in this area at all. It's a scheduled ancient monument there, which we now ironically know less about the scheduled ancient monument than we do about the rest of the village, but it will be there for the future. We've got these two areas. It looks like we've got a linear settlement in the Romano-British period up in this area, along the stream valley. The topography's very gentle, so there's no great variation. You can see there's a stream there. There's something more like an isolated farmsteads. There's nothing very high status in the way of the Roman pottery. Going forward, and we haven't broken it down within the Roman period, because again it's really beyond the area I'm particularly interested in, going forward into the early and middle Anglesaxon period, the 5th to 9th century. You can see both the problem and, in a way, the intrigue of this. None of these pits have produced the Roman pottery producing any early Anglesaxon material. Again, these are pits that have entirely sieved so they've got down to the Roman levels as well. We've just got one pit that has produced the single sheared pottery of this date. Interestingly, it's in sort of the same area as the smaller concentration of Roman material. When we get into the later Anglesaxon period, the 9th to 11th century, we can see we've got a very clear indication that the main area of the settlement today, comes into existence at that time. There's clearly something quite interesting going on here. This is partly exaggerated by the fact that quite a lot of test pits were dug in this area because there's some allotments and the local residents got very interested in them. Nonetheless, they are producing large numbers of shears from the pits and it really does make you wonder what's going on underneath this shearge of monument, which is the earthworks around medieval modern Malian castle. So, one wonders if it's a high state of late Anglesaxon settlement as well. But the area of main Roman settlement, if we do some of that little bit of pottery for a couple of outlying psalms, but really not very much, there's a clear shift in the focus of settlement that has occurred sometime between the Roman period and the 9th or 10th century. It's not really until we see the village starting to grow into a high-grade evil period that we see this area being engrossed into the existing settlement, again, or the growing settlement. So, that Roman area of Roman settlement remains very peripheral to the village as it develops. I'm not going to show you all of our 60 villages for obvious reasons, but this is a very different sort of landscape. It's a very dispersed pattern of settlement. Carthon Road is not quite reaching up there, but it's some sort of action to the pointer on the other end. So, Carthon Road is up here. The test pits have been just at the point of reference, actually the church of Carthon Road is here. There's a sort of area of quite a lot of settlement here. And then a lot of dispersed farms scattered across the landscape there. We've placed test pits where we can, again, the same principle as Perthyn. Looking at the data again, we have virtually no Roman material at all. We've just two of the test pits, one seeing a little tiny array of sherds from the surf context of this test pit and one from there. Apart from that, we've found no material of Roman data at all in any of the test pits and there have been more than 60 dug across there. Into the fifth way of the century, we've found a couple of sherds in this area, but that's all. And then when we get into the late Anglo-Saxon period, we can see it was seen that the main focus of settlement is in this area. Nothing around the later church of Carthon's 13th century. It's the earliest fabric. It was probably there by that opening by the 11th century. And we've also got some of these outlying settlements, clearly in existence in the late Anglo-Saxon period. So we can see how the settlement pattern is developing by that time. And again, we can see how it's growing and the timing law concentrated there. Though interestingly, even when we know the church is in existence, there's virtually nothing that would be sufficient for the amount of pottery to indicate settlement in this area. Here, remember, this is where the Roman pottery, such as it was, came from. Generally, we have remarkably little Roman pottery from these test pits. This shows a map of all of the test pits in eastern England with the percentage of pits which have produced more than a single sherd of Roman pottery. Now, these test pits are only small, but we are sieving them. Roman pottery is visible, easily recognisable, and generally shows up quite well. And we're getting remarkably little of this material turning up. Less, of course, in the early Anglo-Saxon period. And into the late Anglo-Saxon period, we see it starting to kick up again. I'm becoming increasingly, I think, interested in this absence of Roman pottery. We can see when we look overall, this work done by Clancy Cuckord in a master's dissertation looking at some of this material, we can see when we look at the pottery we've got, here's the Roman amounts, late Anglo-Saxon, and then into that high-medium ball. So we've got reasonable numbers of sherds turning up and the weight of the sherds is the same as the Anglo-Saxon material. But actually, there's still remarkably little. Fewer than 10% of the test pits, 8.9% of the test pits are producing more than a single sherd of Roman pottery. And that's very surprising when you start to look at the density of Roman settlement that is indicated in this part of England from field-walking. So this is our convention in Norfolk. The concentrations here are showing, this is for the Roman period. You can see the concentrations which are indicating settlement here. I think I've gotten highlighted, actually. And I just wanted to point out that this is a kilometre. This scale is one kilometre. So you can see how close these settlements are. These concentrations of Roman pottery and how they're clustering around the village. The assumption often is that there'd be more underneath the existing villages. And we see this again and again. This is from Hales-Hechingham Lawson in eastern Norfolk. And again, we've got this same pattern of dense concentrations of pottery finds from field-walking within a kilometre of each other. And they're quite large concentrations. Again, rawns in Norfhamptonshire just beyond our study area. The same pattern. And just to use a different technique, this is a road, excavations along the line of the road, showing the frequency with which Roman settlements are turning up on this. And again, that's the one kilometre scale. So looking at this, you'd kind of expect more Roman pottery to turn up. Almost, if you were putting the late Anglo-Saxon medieval settlements down at random, I started to think you would expect more of them to hit a Roman settlement. Roman settlements are big. They have lots of pottery. The Anglo-Saxon medieval settlements we've dug are big. They cover large areas. They cover five, six, seven hundred metres. We're getting Roman settlements every kilometre. You'd expect more Roman material to turn up, I think. So I'm starting to wonder if the medieval sites and most of these are founded in the late Anglo-Saxon period and some may well have middle Anglo-Saxon foundations. Are they actually deliberately avoiding these sites? And I've kind of avoided or tried to avoid coming to this conclusion because I'm not sure I feel terribly comfortable with it. But when you look, the suggestion is perhaps reinforced when we look again at Lertan and see that when the Anglo-Saxon settlement, if you remember, was here, did re-establish itself. It avoided that area of former Roman settlement. It's not moving back to the streamside area that you'd think might be the most preferable location anyway. And we see this happening often. This is Chedestyn. Sorry, I meant to go to Maxine of these. This is another site. You can see here's where the Roman material is actually Roman villa and associated material around this. But the medieval settlement and the Anglo-Saxon settlement is in this area. The Roman material is on the edge again of the settlement. We see this again and again on the show. Tuff-a-more-shamber at the Roman material turning up right on the edge. This is all modern 1960s housing estate here. The core of the Anglo-Saxon medieval village is up in this area. And again at Nail and down in south-south of North Bessex. Again, very much on edge again. This is modern 20th century housing here. The centre of the medieval villages here and in this area. And Binham again, which has a very distinguished middle Anglo-Saxon archaeological record which I won't go into. But when we look at the evidence, this is where the Roman material is. The medieval Anglo-Saxon settlement is along here, but not on the whole around here. Although there's some interestingly middle Anglo-Saxon material that I'm not going to go to. The only settlement that we have a significant amount of Roman material from in the centre of the medieval settlement is Longmelford. Here's the concentration of Roman material. But even here, when we actually take this forward and we have no early on middle Anglo-Saxon pottery from Longmelford at all. There have been over 70 types of it something from Longmelford. We can see where we get to the late Anglo-Saxon period of the 19th century. This is where the settlement is concentrated. This area are all the Roman material and it's not where that settlement's re-establishing itself. And this similar pattern actually is a power of many look in other places. This is a work you should have done by Richard Jones. Again, you can see the Romano-British settlements are away from the medieval settlements and the areas of the handmade pottery. Well, the handmade pottery is close to the Roman ones. But it is away from the medieval settlement, Focife. I apologise for this. It's a very difficult site to photograph. This is Shatwick in Somerset. The first place really works set to test that it was done. Again, you can see here this is all the Roman material they found in the centre of this village which extends across this area. And you can see some of the medieval pottery there. Unfortunately, in Somerset, they don't really have very much pottery pre-about 1200 anyway. So to summarise, this dearth of Roman pottery I think is unexpected. It isn't given the density of settlement. We would expect to see it more often, I think. And when we do find it, it's very much on the margins of the settlements and beyond the medieval footprints and certainly beyond the late Anglo-Saxon footprints. And we can see this pattern widely across East Anglia and beyond. And I am just starting to think there is a pattern of deliberate avoidance. I don't know why and if anyone has any suggestions I would be delighted. Is it different economic drivers? Are they wanting to site settlements in different places because they're exploiting different resources? Sorry, these have obviously gone out of order. Is it a sort of rejection of brownfield land or the Roman sites considered there's too much old building kicking around? They don't want to use those sites. Is it a cultural apartheid? I think that's probably unlikely if only because when we do find the early Anglo-Saxon handmade material, it tends to be closer to the Roman material, if anything. Although if we get it switchware from the middle Anglo-Saxon period, that's often closer to the late Anglo-Saxon. So does that seem to be a break from that 68700 that our pottery dating isn't, we don't really find it enough to be very confident about? Is it ideological reasons? We're talking about period of Christianisation and the introduction of Christianity to this part of England. Is there some refoundation, some notion that new settlements founded as Christianity expands should be away from earlier settlements? Is there a superstitious avoidance? Are these places considered unlucky? And I put this in really almost as a slightly rye suggestion because what I've really been working on with this material more recently is looking at the impact of the black death, the 14th century epidemic of plague on these settlements, which is dramatic, extremely dramatic. And looking at this possibility that's a shift from the 7th century that people are avoiding these earlier sites, I just start to wonder about the impact of the Justinian plague. So thank you very much for listening. This is very speculative and I would be very interested in any comments, questions, ideas, indeed solutions. Thank you.