 Good evening, president, fellas and guests. This evening John and I are going to talk to you about the results of this work at RAF Laganheath. We are very close to submitting two volumes for refereeing and what we are going to present today is the results of the research that we have been carrying out. I'm going to talk to you really about the background and the field work results and a John will give you some of the more detailed research afterwards. Ariaf Lake Neath lies in North West Suffolk on the western edge of Breckland, which is a special environmental area as characterised with fine-blowing sands, and the eastern edge of the Fenns, which is characterised by its brackish and fresh water lakes and marshes. The Fenn edge is an area of varied landscape, often much too early settlers in terms of rich summer pasture and light soils for farming, and dry winter grazing, so it's an area that's been actively populated through most periods. East Anglia was in the forefront of the early Anglo-Saxon occupation of the 5th century. We've got some renowned 5th century cemetry, Sponghill up here, Lackford down here in Suffolk, and then in the later periods, further occupation, some of the cemeteries that you will have heard of, Morning Fork in Norfolk here in Burracton, and then on the Suffolk coast, Carlton, Colwell, Snape, and of course the Royal Burial Grounds at Sutton Hoo, and the Settlement at Rendonshire, and then the International Trading Port and Waker at Ipswich, and then Burracton Evans' Wethgarth Gardens, another one which I'm sure a number of you will have heard of. Just closing in a little bit, the Riverlark, which runs south of our area of Lake Neath, has got Anglo-Saxon occupations settled in pretty much all the way along its length, just south of Burracton Evans right up to Mildonhawr in this area here, and along there we've got numerous cemetery groups as well as the Lackford Cemetery, for one thing, the Cremation Cemetery there, and also the Settlement at West Stone, and then about six miles south east of RF Lake Neath is the small Roman small town at Icklingham, with its fourth century incubation cemetery, and another cemetery which I'm sure you will have heard of, the Holywell Row Cemetery, a couple of miles south of Lake Neath, and then on the river to the north of Lake Neath we've got the little ooze with the middle Saxon settlement at Brandon, and a little bit further on the important town at Thetford. Archaeological evidence from RF Lake Neath was first discovered really in the first half of the 20th century, as the base was being developed and expanded in that sort of middle of the Second World War, and we're indebted primarily to Grace Lady Brisco, Major Gordon Fowler, both fellows of this society, and Charles Lee, also a fellow, and also an Olympic sailing medalist, which we thought was very interesting, and they're the people who've really given us our background knowledge of this area prior to any of the recent works. Our story really starts in 1957 when Lady Brisco recorded the discovery of a single Anglo-Saxon burial from Lake Neath airfield during construction work. This was then followed in 1959 by the excavation of 32 more burials that were excavated under her oversight, and this became known as the Little Ereswell Cemetery, which again I'm sure some of you will know of. In 1980 further evidence was uncovered during the insertion of a water pipeline where another four burials were found. These were excavated rather unfortunately by the construction contractors, and little piles of bones and finds were left by the side for the Suffolk County Council archaeologists to go and record. It was a bit rough and ready, but nevertheless the information was at least recorded. When in 1997, as part of ongoing base redevelopment, proposals were put forward for a new 500-bed dormitory about 70 metres south of the Little Ereswell Cemetery, archaeological evaluation was undertaken. Primarily we were expecting to find outlying burials related to that Little Ereswell Cemetery. In fact what we found was an entirely previously unknown cemetery, consisting of 264 inhumations and eight cremation burials, and that's this area here. When we started the evaluation we started in this sense, we thought this was obviously the area that was most likely to have these burials, but in fact we found this entirely new cemetery there. This was then followed a fairly rapid succession with work in 1999 down here, and this was the area of those burials from the 1980s where the little piles of finds. So we got a chance to actually go and have a look at that and put some context to those finds. Then in 2001 we got the opportunity to go back to the Little Ereswell Cemetery and revisit the area that was excavated in 1959. Then with further minor works at this end of the large cemetery here in 2001 and 2008, we've been able to bring the total of early Anglo-Saxon inhumation graves to 427 Anglo-Saxon burials and at least eight cremations, all dating broadly to the fifth to late seventh century AD. We're reasonably confident that we've got the majority of burials from this area. The only site where we don't feel confident that we've got the edges is this one down here, the Ereswell 046 site, where as you can see we've got burials continuing from this edge. There used to be a swimming pool in here and burials were reported, but unfortunately not recorded in the late 1960s when the swimming pool was being put in. We're reasonably confident that there are at least a small number of burials here. These could either be this cemetery continuing or a few burials related to this one out here, or it's possible that this cemetery continues right up to the other one. What we are confident of is that there's a definite gap through here. We've had a look at a lot of this area and there's a definite gap through here. We are confident that we are dealing with three individual foci of burial, or three burial grounds. The site is in a wider archaeological landscape and work that's been done initially by Lady Brisco and others in the earlier part of the 20th century, but more recently as a result of developer funded excavations, which we've done over 300 different interventions at RAF Lake and Heath as a result of this work, has identified archaeology really over most of the base. This includes prehistoric settlement and burials scattered pretty much across the whole area, but most importantly, two large bronze age burials here, one of which has got 7th to 8th century burials cutting into the top of it. These lie against this modern road here, which is called Lord's Walk, but in fact excavation has shown that this is a droveway that dates back to at least the late Iron Age. There's then late Iron Age and Roman settlement focused around Caudalhead Mir here, which is a natural spring in the main natural water source, and also settlement and evidence of livestock management of the droveway here. Then we've got evidence of early Anglo-Saxon settlement running in a band approximately north to south and over the top of the Roman settlement, and at this point we have to stress that although the Roman settlement was thriving into the early 5th century, the very beginning of the 5th century, we've got no evidence whatsoever for continuity of occupation between the two periods, and indeed the evidence rather suggests a gap between the two. Then you can see the early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries here, and the Anglo-Saxon settlement is about 200 metres north of the cemeteries, and these 7th to 8th century burials are about 400 metres to the south, and John's goes to talk a little bit more about the chronology later on. Then we've got a smaller area of 7th to 9th century middle Saxon occupation just slightly further to the east. It is notable, I think, that each period of settlement moves slightly further away from the water, and here we have gone on what was originally a watercourse that was filling with peat throughout those periods, so possibly there's an environmental reason behind that. The individual cemetery groups are all contemporary, so at least for the 6th century at least, a burial is carrying on in each of these groups at the same time. Now that in itself suggests or implies that there is a specific reason, that choices are being made about which burial ground the individuals are selecting to be buried in, so that in itself is obviously very interesting. There's a lot of similarity between them. In most cases burials at east-west are lined with the heads at the west end facing east, and burial in coffins occurs throughout the sites as a distinct minority right. Mostly we think you'd probably tree trunk coffins rather than plant burials. Then we've got burials under small barrows on two of the sites. Again, very rare, only a couple of those. We've got two graves, one on this site, the area of 104 and one on 046, of men buried with horses. We've got this level of continuity or consistency amongst the sites, but nevertheless there are also some very distinct differences between each burial ground. To start with Erisal 104, which is the largest and the westernmost of the burial groups, what's really striking about this site is this, we have the shift of alignment of the graves from this group at the top where burial is really quite dense in sort of a northeast-south-west alignment, which shifts as burial becomes more dispersed in the southern area, shifts to a much stronger east-west alignment. Apart from that there's very little evidence of really ordered burial on this site, apart from one or two groups such as here, where we've got a short row of mainly male burials up here, and then down here, which this is one of the horse burials. This is the famous horse and warrior grave that hit all the papers in 1997 and has been on telly, and that's this one here. We can draw a line around about five metres around that grave, which has got no male burials in it at all. It's only children, mainly children, but children and adult females. So there clearly are, there is some level of order into, decisions being made about where people are buried on this ground, but it's quite difficult to sort of unpick it. When we come to 046, which is the southernmost of the groups, and the one that was where the burials were found in 1980, you can see that this is, in here, people are buried in quite strong rows through this site, and with quite a concentration, it's not exclusively so, but quite a concentration of the most richly furnished burials at the west end of the site. You say this is the one where the water pipe went through it, and here you can see they just managed to catch straight through the burial without damaging the rest of it. And then, when we come to the Little Eriswell site, and the one we then dug again in 2001, what is distinctive about this one is that the burials are focused on a bronze-age burial, and you can see these are two bronze-age burials in here, and although there's no ring-ditch, once we put the two, the blue graves are the 1959 burials, and then our graves are the red ones on this side, and once we put the two plans together, it's quite clear that there must have been quite a large bronze-age burrow that these burials were focused on, and that, obviously, it was still extant in the fifth century. Bone preservation is variable on the site, but that's actually quite good for East Anglia, where most of the cemeteries have almost no bone at all, and this has meant that we've been able to do some analysis. Obviously, there's an awful lot of work gone on these sites, and I can only present a selection of the analysis, and we're just picking out one or two bits and pieces. One of the things that we've got to these is quite a high proportion of juvenile burials on the site, particularly Eriswell 046, which is one of the highest in the region, with only more at Great Chesterford at 49.7%. The problem is that that's the site that we haven't necessarily got the entire cemetery, and, therefore, we don't quite know whether this is really telling us that there's something particular about this site, or simply that we happen to have that bit of the cemetery. Amongst these juvenile burials, we've got 12 young people buried with weapons. This in itself is quite unusual, but, in fact, if you look at that table, you can see that quite a number of them are teenagers, and we can certainly make an argument about people moving into adulthood, but, nevertheless, four of these are burials of children under seven years old, and, as you can see here, it's got a spear with a child of six to nine months, so we don't really understand, obviously, what that's about, but it's very interesting to note, and it's quite interesting to compare it with the children with female-gendered grave goods, of which there are 36 of those, so it's obviously more common, and nine of those are under seven years old. We've obviously been able to pick out evidence on these pieces and injuries. We've got a small number of cases of leprosy and polio, we can see in the bones. A high number of burials with osteoarthritis, 30% to 40% of the group with... I think I might not have said earlier on, but yes, I did say it in that 427 burials, so 30% to 40% of those accessible individuals is quite a large number of people demonstrating osteoarthritis, of which the spine was the most commonly affected. There's also signs of physical stress, particularly in the lower limbs, and this is typical, really, of a farming community and people with a very hard physical life, but what is interesting is a very low level of trauma, much lower, really, than we would have expected. There is here a healed fracture, but really a low level of that, and in only one grave have we got signs of any clear evidence of violence actually against the person, and even in that case it wasn't fatal. There's a couple of cases of treffination which isn't really violence, depending on how you view it, I think, neither of them survived. So just coming on to some of the research that we've been able to do, I'm kind of picked on this. As a field archaeologist, I'm used to seeing the discoveries in the field as very much focused on what we find in the field. One of the things that has been so eye-opening for me being involved in this project has been the vast amount of information that we get once we come off site and the evidence that is there in all the objects, which you think you've got to do. It's very arrogant of us as field archaeologists, but you kind of feel you've done it once you've come off site. I'm just going to share with you one or two elements of this before I hand over to John. These are the mineral-preserved organics where we've got quite a lot of evidence for wooden artefacts on the site. This is just one example. Here we've got a shield grip, and you can see on the underside of the grip, you can see wood here from the shield board. We've found that most of the shields, this work, I should say, has been done by Dr Esther Cameron who's done all this work, and I should have said earlier that Sue Anderson has done the osteoarchological work on the site. We've found that the shields are leather-covered, and the main woods are older at 54%, willow and poplar at 32%, and a small number, 10% made of lime. So we're sort of getting a picture of the shields. On the other side of the grip, I don't think you can see here, we've got little strips of leather woven around the grip to make the handling of the shield rather more comfortable. Of course, the evidence from that wood, as well as telling us about the objects, obviously tells us a lot about the environment in which people are living and the resources that are available to them. As well as the evidence for the wood, we've got a large assemblage of textile evidence from the site where it's been in contact with metalwork, and this work's been done by Dr Sue Harrington. Careful examination of this has told us about the assessment of the quality and the weave, the spin types, fabrics, and even some information about the dyes that were being used. This helps us to draw up a picture not only of the clothing that was being worn, but the role of textiles within the burial rite and the cloths that are available to the Anglo-Saxon population. Identifiable fabrics were mostly of wool, although we've got some limited evidence for flax, and the cloths range from course to fine textiles, although, as you'd expect, the majority are medium-weight cloths for everyday clothing. Mostly two-two twills, which are a heavier-weight cloth and provide a nice warm cloth, a double layer of cloth for the clothes and more durable, soft furnishings. We've also got some evidence of patterns in three-one twills and diamond twills that will create both texture and the base for coloured patterns, perhaps blankets and covers, and tabletweaves for belts and braids. The largest assemblage comes from female burials, primarily because the dress accessories are attached to the clothing, and, therefore, that's where the textiles survive. In the male graves, the male grave goods tend to be further away from the body. Of these, the broaches have the most. Largely, because the pins pierce through layered clothing, and often there's then a cloak or something else over the top, so you get textiles surviving both on the pins and on the undersides of the broaches, but also on the faces. In some cases, we've got very fine textiles indicating possibly head coverings or veils across the face. Some of the very finest textiles have come off the wrist clasps, where they're either on fine undergarments, long-sleeved undergarments, or possibly even long-sleeved overgarments on very high status burials. On the broaches, we've also got evidence of streams where broaches, where beads were strung between the broaches, and we can see in some places where the strings have been tied onto the broaches, but also rather more intriguingly, in this case here, evidence where broaches were actually sewn onto the clothing, either through the pin or through the broach itself. Now that obviously, as an act, militates against them being used as broaches, because once you've done that, you can't take them off again. Now, whether this is a specific right for burial, something that's only occurring in that context, or whether actually this is actually reflecting some gradual change in the use of broaches as time goes on, we don't know, but it's certainly something very interesting to note. Mail clothing evidence is much more sparse, but where we do get it, we tend to get it on the face of the buckles. It seems to be showing, it's in folds on the face of these buckles, it seems to be showing a loose-fitting shirt that's sort of flopping out over the waistband. I can't help thinking of something like Johnny Decc in Pirates of the Caribbean, or something like that. Apparently one of these shirts has got a very lustrous finish. It certainly gives the idea of someone rather dashing. There is some evidence on the undersides of the buckles as well of a finer undershirt, but on no occasion where we've got textile on the upper side and the underside, is it the same textile, so you're certainly seeing evidence of the layer of clothing. Finally, we've also got some evidence for soft furnishings. An example here, there's a wooden bowl with a copper alloy rim on it, and it's got a fine, not a fine, an open-weave cloth stretched across the top. Now, this looks like it might be flax, and there's evidence of some sort of variable thickness in the spin and in the weave, suggesting that it might have had thicker and thinner threads and perhaps creating a striped pattern in this. It's stretched across the bowl and it hasn't dropped into it, so it looks as if that bowl may have held something solid that kept the cloth over it. Maybe something just over the bowl or actually that could have been a cloth stretched out over the whole, over the whole burial. So what this gives us, as well as the evidence that we've got to tell us about the Anglo-Saxon clothing, looking at the soft furnishings, takes us away from the bare bones, as it were, of the burial, and gives us a much more colourful view of what's actually going on. At least in some cases, evidence that, whilst we see the burials laid out like that, in some cases, there were actually cloths over the top of the burials may have been hidden from view. So that's really all I've got to say on this and I'll now hand over to John Hines, who's going to give you some, a bit more information about the material resources. Thank you very much indeed, Joe. It was indeed the case that when we were in the position of putting together the research design for the post-excavation work at RAF Lake and Heath, we were in a position to be quite ambitious in how we approached society. Of course it wasn't possible to do everything that one could conceivably do with the results of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. And so our choice was very much indeed to try and focus on the material culture of this particular site to see if we could put together a suite of specialist investigations that would illuminate in a way that hadn't perhaps been possibly before, or at least not on this scale, just what material resources were available to these people and how they used them, what the technology was they had for doing that. However, I also came into this particular project as I was very much involved together with a couple of fellows who are here today, Alex Baylis and Chris Skull on an English Heritage funded major project on the Anglo-Saxon chronology and one couldn't help bringing that, the experience that I was gaining all the time for that on to this project too. So if you're all sitting comfortably and feeling cosy, contemplating soft furnishings up there, I'm afraid we're moving into a little bit more diagrammatic section of the talk for a short time. These are Oxcal produced Bayesian models of the chronology of the site, the result of taking, in this case, mostly high precision radiocarbon dates and using those to test the validity of certain ideas that we had about the chronology of the site. Now a particular interesting one is the one that you have on the left hand side of the screen as you look at it here which is simply taking all of the dates that we have available, oh there we are, put it on now. These are all of the dates that we've got, we haven't split up male and female or anything like that in these from those earlier burial grounds, the three discreet areas are quite close to one another and these fit perfectly well with the hypothesis that we have here a single phase of burial that starts sometime in the 5th century, in fact we think it's probably relatively late in the 5th century around 470, 480 although the nature of the calibration curve means that you have huge amounts of probability will spread back to the early 5th century as well and continues in an unbroken sequence to a particular point here what we were also able to do was to take those burials from the burial ground that's about 400 metres to the south the ERL203 and put in a model that said that the burial grounds to the north came to an end and then burial started at the burial ground to the south the data statistically support that as a valid hypothesis however it's also the case that there is another hypothesis that is statistically equally valid and that is that the two burial in the two areas just overlaps the latest dated burial we've got in the northern area is maybe at the same time or a little bit later than the earliest one that we've got in the southern area but since there has been a lot of debate within the field as to what happened to these big early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries as you move from what we call the early Anglo-Saxon to the middle Anglo-Saxon period this is to the best of my knowledge the first time that we've been able to show at the very least a coordinated abandonment of the traditional burial sites and move to another burial site subsequent to that what I've also got on the right hand side as you look at it here these are the female graves that we have been able to date from this site and they are put into phases in a special scheme which merges the national series of phases with an East Anglion series of phases which Karen Hoylard Nielsen and I first developed and subsequently published by Ken Penn and Beata Brugman and it's particularly interesting if we compare the pattern that we've got here at RAF Lacon Heath with what we had in a much larger sample that was dated within the national project where the curiously dogleg it looks like a healed fracture doesn't it if you can remember this odd dogleg there represents a real problem that we had in the national sample in that we seem to have a lot of women from earlier parts up to the third quarter of the sixth century and then from the second quarter of the seventh century onwards but it was questionable whether there really were any that were fitting in there in between that or there was a phase in which we didn't have furnished burial in fact in RAF Lacon Heath not least knowing of this problem and really targeting but going as closely could for every possible example that we've got we have got a much smoother line running through there we've got one date here that we've had to take out as an outlier it doesn't fit within the model that is going to happen with statistical predictability but it is the only one and even there it's not that far out from the whole thing well just to talk now a little bit about how we can integrate this with the results of some of those specialist studies of the materials there were two PhD projects were built into this project which were undertaken at Cardiff University with a specialist analytical supervision coming in the case of James Peakes study of the glass beads from Professor Ian Freestone subsequently moved to the institute here in London and Jim Peake found some very very interesting evidence on the types of glass that were being used within the glass beads the beads here are put into a chronological sequence going from left to right following the work of Birta Brugman and it's very easy to see in terms of colour coding that the types of glass that are being used change quite dramatically the key ones that I want to draw your attention to are first of all the pale blue bars that we've got here which do appear within our later phases to a degree and in particular with one particular type of bead but they're much more regular down there those represent Roman glass that is being melted down and reused the dark green and the dark blue represent two types of glass which are really rather misleadingly known as Saxon glass it's only Saxon glass in the sense that it was first recognised from Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Saxon contexts and amongst this glass Jim Peake was able to identify a very clear distinction between what he calls Saxon 1 and Saxon 2 glass what this glass actually is it is fresh glass that is coming in is being manufactured in the eastern Mediterranean probably somewhere in the Levant possibly in Egypt in huge blocs it's being traded across into western Europe here is a graph showing the distinction between Saxon 2 and Saxon 1 glass and as we can see it's very very much a continuum there the distinction between the two which is in the form of manganese oxide and potassium dioxide there is very simply that to make Saxon 1 glass or the raw glass that is being used for Saxon 1 glass into Saxon 2 glass you are very simply adding in wood ash it makes your glass go further it also in fact makes the colouration of the glass turn from translucent into a peg but just to briefly knit back to this one here this isn't just a minor change in what you're doing with the glass and making it go further or making it come out in different colours it coincides with a really very dramatic change in the designs of the beads that are being produced and it is therefore symptomatic of a much deeper change in the organisation of production for this community and we'll see more about the chronological and the social context of that shortly the other PHD was done by Matt Nicholas with the specialist analytical supervision of Dr Panayot and Manti in Cardiff and we wanted to do it was familiar from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries for nonferos metalwork to be sampled typically 20 or 30 objects would be taken samples would be cut from them and looked at in great detail and readings drawn from that we wanted to see what sort of results you got if you went for everything if you tried to do a total sample now in one sense we could say the results really did say there's no point doing that again we might just as well sample 20 or 30 but there's probably no point in doing that because we already know what the results will be in any case and much of the really important research that Matt Nicholas did which was involved me a little bit more was on developing statistical methods for using relatively simple means of analysing large data and then processing the results in a significant way the interesting results though that we're getting in the if you like the more presentable forms more easily grass forms come out of this if we look at the range of the copper allies you've got in there where we're looking at the amount of lead the amount of tin the presence of zinc within them and interestingly we get a small number of copper allies that have got no zinc in them at all and therefore more like true bronzes or true gun metals in that way but zinc is extremely volatile so if you're going to lose any metal at all from the mix or at least lose it to a level where it's below instrumental recognition it is going to be zinc and while there are a few interesting specimens in those examples that are along that no zinc parameter there's no real pattern there the interesting thing is therefore while we have some specimens with no zinc we also in fact have a high zinc group that is appearing here which is really very different from any sort of high tin group or high lead group that is distinctive about this group which Matt finds as group 3 there not least when we go into this what is making up this we find that a very high proportion of the specimens are made up of these rather unassuming little things objects called bucket pendants they are simply little model miniature pendants they are a matter of considerable interest to me because it's an artifact type the origins of which are to be sought right to the east in Europe they're in Ukraine, they're in Poland they're in the former Czechoslovakia I will call it and they spread via the angles on the southern Baltic coast to Anglian England in the later 5th century something like 90% of these specimens from RAF Lake Neath fall into this special group here and that brass like ally is also characteristic of Eastern Europe they don't seem to be imported but it does look as if we may have a manufacturing technique that comes in with the object it's also the case that some of these have these wads of textile pushed inside them because of analytical work that's been done in Poland where they find resins in these little pendants which would have been aromatic and may well have been intended to be medicinal as well as dealing with some of the consequences of not washing very often which would be characteristic of these people too we wanted to see if we could sacrifice one of these for analysis and see what results we got of it I'm afraid to say the results were simply negative we didn't find there was no clear evidence of any lipids or fat such as we might expect of it having been impregnated but it would certainly worth doing and it was certainly worth also simply taking one out and checking that it was typical textile that had been rolled up and squeezed into the pendant in that way well as I say I want to go back now and put those sort of results into more of a demographic and social narrative of the site so of course it's got to be done relatively briefly Joe mentioned the fact that we cannot see continuity chronologically stratigraphically materially between our late Roman deposits and the early Anglo-Saxon deposits at this site we would assign the earliest burials we can detect here to around the middle of the fifth century of the eight definitely identifiable cremations we have to say there's a great deal more tiny fragments of cremated bone turns up in the fills of inhumation graves so there will probably considerably more to start with we have just a single well preserved cremation urn it's the example that you see on the screen in front of you there and stylistically this is parallel to the forms that have been identified by Catherine Hills and Sam Lucy in collaboration specifically on the chronology with Susanna Huckenbeck as phase B at Spong Hill and assuming we can or just making the pragmatic assumption that we can transfer a sequence from one site to another site that's not all that far away this would play set to around the middle of the fifth century so something like a quarter of a century before the earliest inhumation graves that we can be confident of being able to date interestingly amongst those very early inhumation graves we have a hint we should say oh we had because it's sort of changed a few days ago a hint from the stable isotope study in that the strontium and oxygen isotope data that has been looked at from a small sample of skeletons at Durham University by Mandy Jay working under the direction of Professor Janet Montgomery had picked up one outlier in terms of the both the oxygen and the strontium levels and they came back saying well interesting that would look like Denmark I think they called it for that and I checked that could mean anywhere really in the Jutlandic peninsula what they didn't know was in fact this was just about our earliest datable female inhumation burial seen prima facie to suggest that we could indeed have a migrant from across the North Sea buried here just earlier this week we got back some lead isotope data or a report on lead isotope data on this skeleton and that in fact said no that looks like a British signal so in fact one of the most exciting things I've always said I'll start believing isotope data when it shows me a medieval population who are buried and have never moved more than 30 miles from where they ended up in the ground and that is actually what it shows us about the overwhelming majority of the individuals that we have had sampled it's important though to stress that in terms of the chronological models we also have two clear stages of use within that site even if those stages are continuous the stages are represented by the fact that from the late 5th century through to some time around the middle of the 6th century I believe all three burial grounds are in concurrent use at a certain point the two least populace of the burial grounds that's the two that are further to the east and the south go out of use and only the largest of the burial grounds continues in use and in fact most of the latest burials are on that different alignment in the northern edge or towards the northern half of that cemetery which Joe drew attention to earlier this change is a change that we can also model using our radiocarbon data and it comes out the model fits with the hypothesis sorry the data fit with the hypothesis that are put to them there's stage one in which all these sites are in concurrent use stage two only that so I haven't put on ERL203 on the end here but it would be perfectly possible to do so the transition at which this take place falls according to the radiocarbon data in a fairly broad period at least to 95% probability AD 510 to 560 in fact that is influenced by the fact that anything that is going into the first half of the 6th century hits a horrible plateau on the calibration curve which spreads probability back to periods in which we know are actually impossible but nevertheless are mathematically possible to something that really intrigues me is if we look at the mean of that distribution there we come to that magic year AD 536 the year of no summer the ffimbled better the great climatic downturn as I say for all those reasons I think that's unreal though curious nevertheless it does suggest to us that whatever change is taking place is taking place in the close aftermath of a major climatic event that we otherwise most certainly know of now we can also then take these data and put them against the number of burials that we have got very briefly in stage one which may last 70 possibly up to 100 years these are the number of burials that we've got in each of these burial grounds given that this time an undatable proportion of burials in these two sites is 55 to 60% to suggest that the 103 datable burials that we have in the largest burial grounds should be matched by at least the same number that are undatable through the grave goods means we probably have 200 plus burials there from the mean life expectancy this would mean we've probably got burial populations of those numbers for each of the sites different sizes and a total burying population of 100 plus or minus a dozen or so there in stage two however things are dramatically different there are only with that number of burials 70 burials left in the largest burial sites that can belong to this second stage it's certainly at least as long as stage one in duration and incredibly the burying population that is implied there seems to have dropped to that which is implied by the truncated cemetery the incomplete cemetery 046 something is pointing to a very very dramatic drop in the burying population around this time and we have to emphasise we know lots of Anglo-Saxon burial sites around here if they all moved away and started burying somewhere else we absolutely do not know where those are I'm going to conclude by just briefly looking at some of the particularly interesting individual graves this was the one that drew a great deal of attention to start with a youngish man at death 25-30 buried with a sword a silver tipped shield which was in front of his chest held in a protective position there a spear up there and this horse a horse that was truly magnificently dressed dressed infinitely better than any person who was buried at this site a tableau that is representing that image of the figure such as we get here note how very small the shields are look where it fits in there that's probably not undersigned in the picture there the large iron bound bucket that was in there very conveniently this horse was buried in harness that included reins and we've got the remains of the reins preserved underneath the bucket as well as well also as evidence of very fine cloth overlying objects here so it looks as if this particular burial was covered in blankets as well when it went into the grave this is a man I find very interesting indeed the shield is there again it's in the chest area but look at the way that hand the left hand is bent up behind it he has been buried literally as if he is carrying holding his shield in front of him in the grave we've got the same typical spear head up in that point there this fellow was buried around about the same time as the man with his horse there but what really intrigued me was this row of iron pins that we've got down there just a little bit away from the leg bone and one of them over there too they're fairly well you know they're distinctly indistinguished if you can use that undistinguished in terms of their actual form but I was intrigued by these by being aware of the fact that amongst the equipment that we've got in the big military weapon deposits from Jutland we do have evidence of the kits of battlefield medics who were with those armies they include knives that can be paralleled in Roman army gear but also little collections of thorns used as suture pins and I do think it's quite just as we saw trethnation we've also got medical evidence of some form of treatment to the leg for this individual this was quite an old man I say that, 40-ish old for this old for this society what we also realised then was that what we had thought to start with was a very strangely placed coffin stain there it looks very much indeed too as if he was buried with a walking stick right beside his hand it's not a spin there it's not an object that's left it's a stain in the soil but it's what it very much looks like and I must admit I cannot think of this elderly warrior with a walking stick without remembering the late minted professor Christopher Hawks and how I used to encounter him all the time musical instruments we actually have three graves of individuals who were buried with musical instruments it's the only Anglo-Saxon cemetery where we have that the recognition of these is I think a very fine illustration of how the team that was brought together has been able to work on these could do things I had picked up in the first run through of the of the grave goods that there was something very very distinctly unusual in the fittings here not least that this man seemed to have two incomplete buckles there's absolutely no way you can put a tongue on this particular buckle it was Enes the Cameron who having worked on the Prittlewell lyre said she thought she recognized these as fittings that were similar to liars and Graham Lawson has subsequently gone in and identified these as being musical instruments of this kind the really interesting thing is that here in the case of this fellow we can see he had actually two spare sets of strings for his lyre in his kit and as Graham said if you break a string on one of these it's far too fiddly to put a new string on it's much easier just to take your whole set of strings off fit another one on tune them up quickly and then you can get on and play in that way we're learning things all of these in that way as they say three graves with liars interestingly they are spread out over the generations of this site they're pretty much spread out from the early 6th century to the middle of the 6th century and to the late 6th century so if you want to play with ideas of a sort of succession of minstrels there I use that word in this particular community you can see that it does also very nicely straight for us the continuity that we have got between the society that is there early 6th century in stage one and the society that we've got in stage two I could of course both of us could go on and on and on and on telling you interesting things about this but we hope this is at least enough to whet your interest to acquire that great two volume report when it comes out which we hope will be sometime next year. Thank you very much indeed for your attention.