 Okay, so the aspects of transition I'm going to be focusing on today is the changing burial practices from mostly furnished graves to mostly un furnished graves. This is a process which takes place across large parts of Western Europe throughout the seventh and into the early eighth century though there's evidence from some areas that's actually part of a much longer process extending back into the sixth century. So my entire study period I'm looking at the sixth to eighth century's AD. Fy angen nowe, mae'n gael ein fynfenon iawn, ac mae'n gweithio'n llog o'r ffordd yma, neu yn ddelirio'n cydweithio'n cydweithiau, neu'n gweithio'n cydweithio'n cydweithiol. Ond mae'r llog o'r ffordd ymlaen i'r llog o'r ffordd yn symr y maen nhw, a'r byw'n gweithio'n cydweithio'n cyfrannu'n gweithio'n cyfrannu'n cyfrannu, a'r ffordd y maen nhw ymlaen nhw'n ffynwys i'r bwyllt ar y maen nhw. Ac yn ni'n dweud yn ymddangos ar gyfer y prosesau yw'r gweithio, wedi'u gael y bwysig ar hyn o'r mwyaf, ond mae yw'r rhagor yn fawr yn ei ddweud. Ac yn rhaid i ddweud, y dyfodol y peth yn ystod y gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ddweud o'r llangellau yw'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. So my study area includes six different modern day countries, all of which have quite different approaches to excavation, to chronological analysis and to publishing, not to mention the different research trajectories which have taken place in those different countries over the last 50 years or so. Another issue with looking at this sort of transition is that the type of evidence is fundamentally different on either side of it, so archeologists tend to approach furnished burial quite differently ac mae'r bwysig iawn yn ôl. Rydw i ni smalldoddol o fenogol Cronologlowedd. Rwy'n rhan o'r amlwg erbyn o'r oedlai, ac yna'r bwysig iawn i'n rhaglau'n dymlo'n hyn, am ydych chi'n mynd hwnnw o'r tyflau defnydd yw amguedd yn dartyni辵ar y gallwn môl. Rwy'n gweithio ar gwaith bwysig iawn ar rai cyflau sengfriddau sixa o bwysig. England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland and that's given me a sample of 246 cemeteries containing in total 33,690 graves. Now that sounds like an awful lot but it's actually a really tiny sample of what's available to me. I've only included cemeteries where I had a full grave catalogue available so a grave by grave inventory of everything that was all the objects which were associated with those graves although I did have to relax that for some areas particularly this part of northern France here where I found it quite difficult to find those full grave catalogs. Most importantly though is that I had good chronological evidence available for the cemeteries so ideally that would be things like absolute dating so radio carbon dates, dendro, chronology dates, or coin dated graves but those are unfortunately all too rare so second best was some of the typological studies which have been done although of course that does exclude the unfurnished burials. I've also only concentrated on cemeteries that contain more than 20 individuals just to try and keep this project to something of a manageable size. So taking that data I've created a series of kernel density maps using ArcGIS so this is the density of cemeteries at the start of the 7th century which is probably when I have that my densest concentrations and you'll see that there are some quite big geographical differences. There are some areas where there are lots of burials so East Anglia and Kent this low alignment region in particular but then there's some areas where I've really struggled to find cemeteries so South of the River Seine in France and that is a well documented, there's a lack of known cemeteries there. Some of these clusters however are more a result of excavation and study biases rather than historical realities so you will notice that a lot of these groupings actually correlate to where you have really good chronological studies which are taking place. So you've got the work of Hans and Bayless up in England and this is Peran and the Gouge's chronology normalise there, the work of the Franklin Arvites blooper analysing the chronology of the lower Rhine region and then South Germany is another area where there's been a lot of really good chronological study done. So there are some questions over how much this just reflects the level of study and how much it actually reflects historical reality. The most striking differences though are the chronological biases that I have. So when you compare the cemetery density at the start of the seventh century to what I have for the end of the eighth century that is quite a drastic difference there. Archeologists have traditionally been less interested in those usually later unfurnished cemeteries and I think the biggest problem with them is the dating of them. When you don't have the artifacts you do have to rely on things like radiocarbon dating and there are of course geographical differences in how commonly radiocarbon dating is used. So you'll notice although it's not very high the concentration in England is higher than the rest of the continent and that's because the English scholars do tend to use radiocarbon dating more though this is starting to change and it's starting to become more common in continental practices as well. A really big problem in the literature is this assumption that unfurnished cemeteries are always later than furnished cemeteries. So quite often you will read a cemetery excavation report and you'll read that this cemetery dates to the eighth to ninth century but there's no evidence to actually support that claim. So unfortunately I can't use those cemeteries in this sort of analysis without it leading to a circular argument. So to try and get around some of these issues about the very different levels of evidence available I've created some relative kernel density maps. So I've created density maps based on the average number of objects per grave and then shown that relative to the cemetery densities so the maps I showed you earlier and this somewhat accounts for sampling biases not entirely where you have areas where there are very few cemeteries there are still question marks over exactly how reliable some of these averages are but the advantage of this method is that it smooths out areas which have been subject to really intense study so where you see high densities of grave wood use on the maps you can be pretty confident that that's because people were richly furnishing their graves that it's not just an area where there's a lot of well-published well-studied cemeteries. I also at this stage carried out a hotspot analysis so this is shown the squares are statistically significant hotspots and the triangles are statistically significant cold spots and the relative sizes of those symbols is to do with confidence levels in that statistical significance but everything that's plotted is over 90% confidence. So this map here is the initial distribution at the start of the sixth century and you can see there's a fairly clear dividing line running from the coast south east down for the Alps south of which you have very low levels of grave wood use so you've got statistically significant cold spots over Burgundy over northern France and the grave wood averages they're approaching one object per grave on average but many of them are far far lower than that. Then north of that dividing line you have more of a band of medium use with pockets of of much higher density so I think East Anglia in Allemania and Bavaria and there some of the averages are approaching four or five objects per grave so how does this change as we go forward in time so for the first half of the sixth century there's actually very little change it's quite static then as you reach 550 this is where you start seeing those high concentrations in Anglo-Saxon England particularly what decreasing as you reach the start of the seventh century there's another period of stasis up until about 650 AD where you start seeing that decline in England beginning again and this is all leading up to the pivotal point I think of 685 so it's going to pause the the run through there and this is where according to Heinz and Bayless's chronology 685 is the date that most of the Anglo-Saxon furnished cemeteries go out of use. I think there's evidence from some areas that a few of them continue in use slightly later than that but there is a significant change and what's interesting is on the continent at exactly the same point there's also much more of a decrease in those concentrations than you've seen previously it's nowhere near as marked as it is in England but it's it's definitely something interesting going on there and then that moment seems to accelerate the process of change so as you get up to 730 AD that's when most of the aluminium cemeteries go out of use and then by 760 AD that pocket in the lower Rhine which was hanging on has also gone. At the end of the 8th century there is very little grave reduce across the continent there are still some statistically significant hotspots but when you have such low grave reduce everywhere even one or two objects could be causing that. I think what is interesting is the fact that all of England is showing up as a statistically significant hotspot so that suggests that maybe the abandonment of grave goods is more complete there than it is elsewhere. So what these maps have demonstrated is change that result from cemeteries going in and out of use but it doesn't really account for any change that might be going on from within cemeteries so I've combined that GIS analysis with a more in-depth statistical analysis of individual cemeteries. So I don't have time to go into all of these in detail unfortunately but I chose them mainly because there are large numbers of graves from which I could get quite precise dates from that allows me to plot change over time. So these cemeteries here from Wessex, Alemania, Francia and Bavaria all show a statistically significant decrease in their grave reduce over time and that grave reduce appears that so the decrease in grave reduce appears to start around the mid 6th century. I don't want to be too precise about these dates because the points that I've plotted they're just the mid points of ranges and all of these cemeteries have been dated by slightly different methods which aren't necessarily comparable but roughly the mid 6th century is when this decline seems to start and that is exactly when on the the broader scale we saw those first changes appearing in the annual Saxon burial records. So this isn't true of all regions that you see those changes within the cemeteries so these ones from East Anglia, Castlebite South, sorry East Anglia and Northumbria, Kent and Burgundy none of those show a statistically significant decrease over time and I know it looks like there's a very nice dip at the end of Castlebite South use but actually those last two phases only have one grave each dated to them so that's that does not come out as a statistically significant at all. What I find particularly interesting here is that of the four Anglo-Saxon cemeteries that I've analysed in this way three of them show change over time. Of the ones from the content that I've analysed there's only one that doesn't show change over time and that's from Burgundy which is one of the regions with the lowest grave would use to start off with so there's very little room for it to decrease significantly further. So this suggests to me that the change on the continent is occurring primarily within the cemeteries whereas the change in England there's there's much more of a rapid turnover of cemetery use so cemeteries are abandoned and reformed more rapidly so there's very little chance to see that change over time within the cemeteries and it's only really visible at the larger scale. Shall I bring everything together now? So at the start of the sixth century you have quite different types of practice scattered across the continent so South Germany and Anglo-Saxon England initially appear quite similar with their high levels of grave would use and then they're separated by this band of slightly lower grave would use in Francia but those two areas which appear quite similar to start off with change over time in quite a different way. So the Frankish and the Alemanian cemeteries the continental ones appear to be a bit more rooted they're places that people return to time after time to continually bury their dead even with the way in which you bury your dead even when that is changing. The Anglo-Saxon ones are less rooted in the landscape it seems to me they are abandoned reformed more quickly and when people start burying their dead differently they possibly move to a new cemetery to do so. So this has been quite a brief overview of my work I've also done a mid-range analysis of looking at individual regions in more detail there are smaller regional differences within England within those very broad areas of the continent particularly in the ways that different types of grave goods are used and I haven't really had a chance to discuss those there here but hopefully this has given you a broad overview of the way different parts of the continent might be relating to each other and influencing each other. Thank you.