 Hello everybody! What I want to do for this first presentation in this afternoon's lot, while you're all do's gently enjoying the sandwiches, slowly digesting in your stomachs, is to reflect on the landscape context and I hope to do that, it was a task set for me and I feel very privileged to be invited and thankfully organisers for inviting me Mae'r cyfrifio eu cyrraedd yw'r holl iawn, ond ymdweud ynglynch, ymdweud ymdweud o'r cyfrifio, ymdweud ymdweud ymdweud? Fy oeddwn ni'n meddwl hwnnw'n meddwl'n ffasilydd ymdweud ymdweud yw'r cyfrifio mewn cyfrifio mewn ymdweud o'r holl iawn o'r holl iawn o'r holl iawn. Mae'n hynny'n oed i'r holl iawn o'r holl iawn o'r holl iawn. I'm not saying this is preliminary ideas for you just as a cop-out to deflect criticism but really to sincerely say these are going to push some ideas out there for potential future research or not depending on how it goes. So this is an opportunity to think about the horde in a landscape context. The first thing I have to tell you I think is very important is to say as Chris Fern does on page 24 of the new monograph the context is problematic. If that one could go so far as to say there is no archaeological context for a Staffordshire horde that was found in the plough soil and if you want to be absolutely stark about it there is no clue of how it entered that field before July 2009 and already a few people have impressed just played with the idea at early stages and I'm not holding them to it now but the idea that it could have been a 9th to 10th century deposit and indeed Ray and Batty have suggested an often a late 8th century mercy and context for this kind of deposit. I'm not going to suggest that as an orthodoxy but it makes the point clear that we still don't really, we can't pin down how it got to that field before 2009. The field work was very limited and this is not exceptional, this is typical for this kind of discovery. There's no real broader context identified for the horde even within its own field and there's been no wider landscape analysis since Delawook's important valuable 2011 contribution and that was from a landscape history perspective and not an archaeological one. Now the 2019 monograph which we all hope to read and acquire and read very soon is a phenomenal achievement and it contains an important basis for a landscape analysis but given the nature and structure of the research the commentary on the landscape is fragmented across multiple chapters including contributions and thoughts by a range of the authors. I'm sure that's not an exhaustive list of those that address the issue of the landscape context and different points within the monograph. So I was saying we need a broader landscape approach and there are multiple ways forward for doing that I feel that still have to be done and I'd like to present five ways that foreground the issue of memory and the horde. The first one is to suggest we need to look at the horde as its own landscape encoding memories of spatial material transformations, very much building on what we've heard already. Think about the significance of the place and the issue of consignment and memory and there's still options for how we interpret that act of depositing the horde. Then we can look out to the broader landscape and there's many things we can address here but I've picked on movement, surveillance and power because I think that links very much to what I'm doing at the moment thinking about other mercy in archaeology in further west. Yes, and I think we need to think beyond the Anglo-Saxon and the Mercy in labels to think about a frontier landscape and indeed perhaps west I'm thinking here again. And as already been discussed the need for more comparative landscape analysis. Yes, the Savage Horde is unique and exceptional but can we put it into a comparative perspective looking at other deposits and finds. So, just to start us off, we have this field and we have right next to Watley Street and a field where we still haven't had a full extensive investigation of that field let alone surrounding fields. But we can think of the horde as a landscape. It embodies various spatially located activities. We don't know where they were made but we can think about the relationship with this biography of individual objects and the different elements composing it. It's making, it's exchanging. This was a horde that was always on the move as parts of other objects that were once were and perhaps also as fragments. They're wearing and wielding, they're displaying and curating. The surfaces that they create with the dynamic art could be another kind of landscape that we think about and the skins that would have been covered by them. The assembling and fragmenting, I would like to emphasise, has to be thought about in terms of spatial arrangements in terms of how it was assembled and how it may have been publicly or not fragmented, broken up. Other bits of these objects went elsewhere. The blades, most certainly, of the daggers and swords. Storing or displaying as fragments and then the depositing. Now that's areas we've already seen addressed so I won't dwell on that any further. Although I would completely chime with what Karen's paper delivered by John this morning was saying, we need to set up more robust models for thinking about how those spatial arrangements may have taken place during the life histories of objects. Obviously we can't pin it down exactly but I think we can do more work there to set up possible scenarios that we can then think through and think of different explanations for the significance of these objects. Linkie to what Tanya was talking about, the importance of mobile wealth and exchange items in this warrior elite culture and as Franz was saying, perhaps also going beyond the elite more. Second point, the significance of place. Now here we really are even struggling with this first stage aren't we? Because we don't have a mound or we do have a mound. We don't really have a one deposit or multiple deposits over time. The intriguing possibility of two bits of horse harness which evoked that opening image from the Pottery's exhibition showing a rider on a horse with all the gear on him or just evoking the idea of a rider in the field. Do we have multiple deposits within this site? So do we know this was a one-off place chosen randomly or for convenience for deposition or are we looking at some place that maybe temporary activities are happening regularly but we just can't see them. The exception being the one deposit which is leaving a trace because it's made of such obviously recognisable material. It's a mound or is it? Do we really have an archaeology of an ancient feature, a temporary feature, a natural knoll that may be perceived as an ancient monument in the early medieval period? So we still really don't know whether we are looking at a place that had significance or a place that was significant because it wasn't significant if that makes sense. A place that was not a familiar place but was well accessible and well known. We have the landscape of movement, surveillance and power and I think John and Sam may be addressing some of these issues as follow-up papers but I do want to just make the point that Della Hook does take us on a very important journey I think as does the monograph thinking about the clear stark distribution of finds the contrast Western East or South and West where we have hardly anything in this more marginal landscape and the distribution of finds of Roman medieval dates towards Lettocetum, 3.5 km to the east and the small settlement, Roman settlement of Wall and of course Lichfield. So we potentially have a site that may seem marginal but it's on the key routes. It may be a site where you may want to set up a watch tower where you may assemble, where you can see people approaching. There's all sorts of potentials for thinking about this marginal location in terms of surveillance movement into and out of a core district for the Mercy and Kingdom. This is a game from Della Hook and Leahy's work and others to mapping Canot Chase and Hay. These areas are later known as Woodland and Open Woodland. Important resources but marginal land for settlements and also other features including this enigmatic naves castle on Watling Street which has been at least by some seen as potentially a Roman signal station. Just to tell you quickly through some of Della Hook's other mapping from a later back projection we can consider perhaps this a marginal location but on key routes and a key place you'd be aware of and pass by. Hence my point about significance by not being significant. Not a place you'd necessarily inhabit or dwell at but you'd always be passing by. Motorway services but fewer Starbucks. So you know and again this idea that it's on the edge of something else and I think that's very interesting and here I think Tanya was mentioning this earlier. This is Della's map of reconstructed roads to make the point well Della makes the point that it's always like in a no man's land island of a triangle of roads and that may be interesting in itself that you know it's somewhere where you can't really go without being observed and yet no one's really perhaps dwelling there for long. I can't be any more precise than that so these are only I don't think I'm anywhere further ahead than anyone else with this or further behind in the sense that we're looking at that sense of marginality and yet connectedness if that's a useful and here Horowitz argues at Nace Castle it may be a signal station and we have the Hammerwitch name which David Parsons and Della as well have discussed in relation to the horn side as a potential at some point in the early Middle Ages a settlement connected to metalworking perhaps. My fourth point I've jumped quite quickly here but I want to get on with this. Frontier landscapes and this is why I think I think we really are struggling a little bit more. Yes we're close to a mercy in heartland but we're really still struggling here and this is from I think it's John's section of the monograph here. We're still really struggling to connect it into what we traditionally call Anglo-Saxon burial and artifact traces. So here we have the Trent Valley, here we have Repton and here we have Litchfield. So we're not far away from areas where we have 5th to 7th century furnished burial rites whatever that may mean and we're not far away from the but basically evidence of barrow digging in the 19th century of batement excavations of others in the Peak District and yet we're not, emphatically not in that area where we have those traces in the vicinity. We have the idea there may be two early tribal groupings or either side of the Watling Street going over Canock Chase and this upland spread of the Midlands but we are, really I would suggest we actually need to think about this much in a much broader landscape frontier. If we again, I think this is discussed in John High's section of the monograph you know that his dated, the monsterly dated 7th century weapon burials makes very clear to us that the Staffordshire Horde is not proximal to this kind of activity if it is being deposited in the late 7th century and Kevin Levy has done a lot of work on this as well in his 2015 paper making the point here I feel that we're not at the heart of distributions of other war gear finds from the early Middle Anglic Saxon periods. We are on that western edge and indeed the monograph maps themselves make this absolutely crystal clear the shaded area is crudly the area of furnished burial in the 5th to 7th centuries we can quibble about that in many different ways I'm sure many of these people in this room have expertise in this but the crude point is there isn't it the Staffordshire Horde is just west of this line and we can replicate that again and again in distribution maps of different material this is from John Blair's fascinating and brand new or it's still for me brand new book I'm looking at Middle Anglic Saxon settlement finds and settlements and fine strafines and again making the point that the Staffordshire Horde is at the very west of this density of known material culture and if this thanks to Peter Reval of the PAS again makes the point this is from Shatterfines I know it's a bit later but you know we can tour this contemporary or near contemporary or perhaps not so near contemporary but you know slightly later but making the point that this zone is a real threshold okay so that in the popular gauge of maps we've created for Mercia for Roger Brown and Kevin in his book we do Mercia is the big square a maps late 8th century Mercia may be but in this period I think frankly we have to see if this is the frontier not the big square that links the D, the wash, the 10s and the 7 and I think that's really important that we remember that point and again from John Blair's work a mapping here of this sort of frequent settlement archaeology zone and Staffordshire Horde to the west of it okay and if we look at it in terms of battles from the 7th century again I'm stealing all the maps and all the images from the monograph we can understand it in terms of a frontier that's about Mercia engagements to the north west and east and not as a heartland of Mercia in a sense and this makes me jump to this broader comparative landscape context because I do feel that the dikes of which I'm most obsessed with at the moment that are what's dike in, of this dike are very much seen as borders of Mercia and they shut down our thinking about this broader westernly Mercia zone from the 6th and 7th century onwards and I'd like to point out three, well I'm going to talk about a number of different sites on this western side that perhaps might provide parallels. So the Din and Pommel comes from a find from the river crossing, this is from Ludlow and I want to make a point that while this is obviously only a single pommel find it's nowhere near the scale, it's broadly contemporaneous in style and form to some of the pommels from the Staffordshire Ford and here we find it at a key location, a key river team crossing place deposited in a watery context another one that Mark Redknap mentioned earlier in discussions is the Grestford pommel this is a pre-conservation top left and then I think a nicer photograph bottom right, different sides of this object and this is another pommel, broadly contemporaneous styles to those found in the Staffordshire Horde and it's found in Grestford now we don't have an exact find spot so I'm making it up a bit here but I want to make a point that Grestford is hardly an arbitrary location as Mark has already said today this is in the frontier zone as it is to become so here we have Watt Stike which I'm currently thinking is early 9th century successor to our Offersdike, Offersdike runs about here and you've got an iron age hill for to Brynallan and Grestford village is here now I don't know, I put a massive weight to Stike because I don't know but this is where the Alleyne River changes course in a significant shift leading out of the Welsh uplands to the Cheshire Plain so whatever's going on in this area there's evidence of a Roman shrine at Grestford there's evidence, this is a threshold location that has parallels with the Staffordshire Horde so we have a forwarding site for one pommel, a dinner and by later it's a settlement and we have Grestford is hardly an arbitrary location where this single pommel was found now I'm not saying we can jump from this to a pattern but I'm not sure what's started to give you a flavour what it looks like big linear earthwork I can't jump to a pattern from this but I do think we have to consider that the dikes may be being put at locations that are already very familiar to the Mercians their Welsh rivals and almost everybody else moving their armies and their trading activities through this landscape and here's a third one for you this is Chantysillio Paris this is right by the River Severn the River Vanwy up here because it may be very well known to you from readers of medieval archaeology but perhaps less well known from the fact that Cotsworld archaeology expanded on the excavations by Clwyd Paris Archaeological Trust and in the Archaeological Journal a couple of years ago published a huge ceremonial landscape of the Neolithic and Bronze Age the earliest seapat excavations found an early medieval cemetery and where the green star is at the top end of the burial mound they found two early medieval spearheads now I'm hardly saying this is a parallel activity but again you have the deposits of weaponry in an ancient burial mound context and the point I want to flip back to is that this is right next to Arthur's Dyche so if Arthur's Dyche is late 8th century and that's still an if we have the ceremonial landscape where people are doing things burying the dead, the positive weapons in the 6th, 7th century or thereabouts my point is this isn't a parallel for the Staffordshire Horde but it does suggest a broad a framework of activity of a mobile western mercy in Frontier Zone the various British kingdoms in which these locations at key routes through the landscape clear observable thresholds next to major rivers may have been sites where activities of a ceremonial or ritual nature are taking place that's as far as I can go so we're part of an evolving Frontier Network and Zone and let's jump forward to make a couple of extra points to conclude thinking about the pillar of Elizeg this 9th century fragment of a cross which I was involved with Nancy Edwards and Gary Robinson at Bangor in excavating and conclusively demonstrating is sitting on top of an early Bronze Age burial mound just to the west of the modern town of Llangothlund and as a side shoot from the D Valley in the Vale of Llangothlund now this early 9th century monument has the most monumental surviving Latin text longest Latin text on any monument you can hardly see it now but when transcribed in the late 17th century it reveals a text written by Congan commissioned by Congan King of Powys to on his great-granddaddy Elizeg to evoke military victories and battles past and perhaps victories present and hoped for now this is hardly a weapon but it is a propagandistic monumental weapon in a sense possibly at an assembly site possibly a muster site for armies and evoking military victories and one does happen to can't help but reflect on the possibilities that could the Staffordshire Horde be a very different material manifestation of similar conceptual ideas ancient mounds and prominent roots deployed to mobilise identities and memories and indeed why we don't know exactly how it would have looked like is Aaron Watson's visualisation of what the mound the ancient mound raised with a new fresh cross may have looked like we have to see this erect here to celebrate martial victories past and present in a prominent landscape location perhaps the site of assembly or as Nancy Edwards says a royal and auguration site and what's important I think to flag up here there's a kind of landscape analysis I did with Patricia Morrieta Flores now of Lancaster University but formerly of my department where we looked at the broader least cost pathways of this location and suggested it's had a key relationship a key node, it was a key node in movement through this landscape there may have been a symbolic and economic importance for the Powysian dynasty I can't go into all of that here but I think that's part of this pathway so it's actually shown that if you go west east up the Vale of Langotland you're more likely to have passed by the pillar of Elizeg than follow the river and I think that's an important spatial analysis project we did to reveal new aspects of the landscape that you can't see on the ground so it's part of this so what I'm suggesting is that the site of the pillar of Elizeg in the red dot is part of a landscape contested through the 7th, 8th, 9th century and is a much later by two centuries in this case in the Staffordshire Horde but it may be utilising the landscape in a way that there are parallels with the Horde the final site I want to talk about is later still 10th, 11th century and across at Minerquivyr in Whitford in Flintshire this has been surveyed around it by David Griffith of Oxford University, analysed by Nancy Edwards my comments on this are that it's another monument that deploys weaponry it deploys weaponry in the figures the martial figures are a warrior or a weapon individual on the side the south side and this individual with a spear an axe a sword or a very long other appendage between his legs in the middle of the eastern face not only that but there are cut marks on it down here of unknown date which could be blade cuts which has parallels with Irish and Scottish which seems to have been suggesting some kind of blade ritual associated with inauguration or other kinds of ritual practices sometime in this process used we don't know when that happened because this has been standing since the 10th or 11th century so what I would suggest is that a very interesting muster location very interesting landscape location which I can't go into here but believe me when I say this is perhaps an assembly site and indeed David Griffith has already got into print saying that too and maybe we're seeing weapon depiction rather than weapon deposition in this case four centuries later being used in the landscape to articulate control of land and movement through the landscape so I'm not giving you any simple answers but I am going to leave you with a thought on this we don't know if this was a clandestine deposition or a public deposition we don't know if this was a place that was nowhere or somewhere so that doesn't narrow down much for you does it but I think we have to think beyond the ritual verses sort of concealed loot frameworks that we've been presented with that's what I was asked to do to think further about that and I think we have to think about the relationships between these four so what I'm suggesting here is you could have a very significant clandestine deposit that people know is deposited somewhere where no one knows it they know that they've gone out somewhere and they've deposited away and that could have a very important mnemonic in itself we've taken this stuff out of circulation we're not going to tell you where but it's out there so it could be clandestine that could be clandestine in one sense but also public in another sense so you can publicly bury something where no one knows where it is or you can secretly bury something where everyone knows roughly the zone in which you're burying it and you can also have the usual ones we're thinking of a concealed place nowhere and a public place that's famed and remembered so I'm putting that out there to suggest that it's complicated than perhaps we're thinking about and perhaps we should be thinking in a sort of network of mnemonics here rather than simply as a ritual deposit or a concealed secret deposit thank you very much