Documenting the dead: creating an online census of Anglo-Saxon burials from Kent

Documenting the dead: creating an online census of Anglo-Saxon burials from Kent Stuart Brookes, Sue Harrington, Martin Welch The funerary remains from east Kent constitute an important corpus of early Anglo-Saxon material, the recent reassessment of which has significantly advanced our understanding of Anglo­ Saxon communities in Kent. Here the authors describe their Anglo-Saxon Kent Electronic Database (ASKED), an important model for the development of online resources in archaeology and produced to facilitate research in this area.


I
n recent years there have been con siderable advances in the application of computer technology to research in the humanities.One significant benefit of this has been an increased capacity to gather and manipulate large quantities of information on a given sub ject.Another has been to make this data more easily available to a wide range of scholars with diverse research interests.Researchers into the Anglo-Saxon period of England (AD 400-1066) have been in a good position to develop and exploit such resources.By making information from their different subject areas more widely available, they are able to compare data and, as a result, gain a much deeper under standing of the period.

What is ASKED?
The Anglo-Saxon Kent Electronic Data base is a collaboratively built research tool, developed initial!y to facilitate the doc toral research oftwo Institute of Archaeol ogy students: Stuart Brookes, investigating state formation in Anglo-Saxon east Kent, and Sue Harrington, examining aspects of gender and craft production in early Anglo Saxon England with particular reference to the early kingdom of Kent.3Both projects were supervised by Martin Welch and drew on the wealth of data contained in the burials of the period AD 400-750.These inhumations were frequently furnished with dress fitments, weapons and personal effects, to the extent that this period can be viewed as being among the most excep tionally rich in British archaeology.Such burials are particularly abundant in Kent, with nearly 50 cemeteries having been excavated there over the past 200-300 years (Fig. 1).
Gaining an overview of such a large dataset is difficult at the best of times, but the situation was made more difficult by the disorderly state of the excavated mate rial.Several of the major cemeteries were excavated by antiquarians, such as the Reverend Brian Faussett, who, in the course of demolishing seventh-century barrow graves, nevertheless recorded them to a standard in advance of his time (Fig. 2) .His collection was acquired by a Liverpool businessman and given to the City of Liv erpool.Unfortunately, some of the mate rial fr om the extensive Ozengell cemetery (on the Isle of Thanet near Ramsgate) did not survive the bombing of Liverpool City Museum in Second World War.Material fr om other cemeteries was dispersed to several museums.The material fr om the important cemetery at Sarre (on the west ern end of the Isle of Thanet above the Wantsum Channel) now has six different locations, and significant quantities have been de-contextualized and mixed with finds from other sites.Better represented are those cemeteries excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, for example by VeraEvison and the late Sonia Chadwick Hawkes (Fig. 3).The majority of these have been brought to publication, although some more com pletely so than others.In more recent times, the piecemeal excavation of east Kent cemeteries by various contracted fi eld units, in advance of building devel opment and works associated with the cross-Channel rail link, has further dis persed the archaeological material, occa sionally separating the paper archive from the artefacts.
Although approximately 300 published articles deal with the material from these 50 or so sites, the level of detail presented is not consistent.A backlog of unpublished excavation material from significant cem etery sites has built up over the past 20-30 years, during which time material may have been mislaid, been misidentified, deteriorated or become subject to dispute regarding their interpretation or owner ship.Researchers have, in the mean time, been allowed access to discrete parts of the material, such as the spears, buckles and certain brooches, pending their publica tion.However, this has served to restrict the archaeological research agenda for the Several projects have been inspired by this potential for greater communication between the different disciplines of Anglo Saxon studies (archaeology, history, coin studies, linguistics and place-names).The first steps have been to refine the discrete data sources and place them into a compu ter-manipulable environment.The Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds, for example, lists all of the coins minted between 410 and 1180 found in the British Isles as single finds (as opposed to hoards).Other examples, the Prosopography of Anglo Saxon England and the Electronic Sawyer of Anglo-Saxon Charters, have made vir tually all the written texts of the period readily accessible online.1By comparison, it appears that archaeologists of the Early Medieval period have only latterly begun to explore this potential.Although these researchers do routinely use computer technology to deal with the intricacies of this data-rich subject (we know of more than 25,000 burials in England for the period AD 400-750 alone), little of this information has been appearing in the pub lic domain in an accessible format.It is with the aim of addressing this imbalance that we are launching the Anglo-Saxon Kent Electronic Database (ASKED) online with the Archaeology Data Service.2We would argue that a truly contextualizing database for the Anglo-Saxon period must revolve around the archaeological evi dence, the sheer volume and complexity of which outweighs that of any other source.
t:; A /:;A A.a.4 A l::,. �:    period to issues of typology and cultural affiliations, looking at objects not people, rather than exploring broader issues such as state formation or identity in a time of dynamic social change.
In order to use this much fragmented corpus, and to be able to address questions central to our researches, it was decided to reassemble as much of the identifiable archaeological data as possible in a new, unified and cross-comparable format.The period October 1999 to January 2001 was spent in museum stores and other venues, working through the site archives of all partially and fu lly excavated Anglo-Saxon cemetery sites from east Kent, and making a catalogue of the finds from the few settlement sites of the period.4Archives visited included the British Museum, the Powell Cotton Museum at Quex Park, the Royal Museum at Canterbury, and Maid stone Museum and Art Gallery (Fig. 4).The intention was to gather together as fully as possible all of the artefactual data for each site, to structure it back into discrete grave groups, and to date it according to the latest available information.By way of support for our individual researches, previously neglected categories of data were also generated, for example, the weights and raw-material content of the artefacts, the location on objects of the surviving textile fr agments, and detailed recording of the weaving equipment from female burials, either as an extension ofreports already in the public domain or as completely new data from previously unexamined mate rial.
The ASKED project has identified some 150 different artefact types, many with typological variants , which were used as grave goods in the early Anglo-Saxon period.The total number of objects entered into the database is in excess of 11,000 fr om within 3,750 burials.This rigorous approach has allowed, for example, an updated and comprehensive listing of spear types found in Kent.ASKED com prises a series of related data broken into three main types: cemetery, grave and arte fact.Cemetery data include information on the site, its location, underlying geology, excavation history and date range of its use.Grave data provide each individual burial with a unique identifier (or name), their estimated age at death, their biologi cal sex and their gender ascription based on their associated grave goods.For exam ple, DBU20 refers to Dover Buckland grave 20, a female child with feminine grave goods, buried c.AD 520, from the important cemetery excavated by Vera Evison in 195 3 (Fig. 5).The grave goods, where present, determine the ascribed date range for the burial of that person, although the majority can be placed only within broad phases.Artefact entries give details ofthe type, the material composition, weight, position in the burial in relation to the body, and an assessment of the provenance or source of the object, for example imported (amber from the Baltic) or coming from another region (brooches from Sax on areas) (Fig. 6).
Through using ASKED, new insights into aspects of early Anglo-Saxon society and economics have been achieved.For exam ple, it is now possible to identify the early Anglo-Saxon framework for the develop ment of the kingdom of Kent, by defining how different communities exploited the landscape.5Similarly, geographical infor mation systems have enabled the spatial relationship between Early Anglo-Saxon settlement and previous Roman patterns to be explored.Manipulating the same data, but from a slightly different theoretical perspective, it is now possible to identify sixth-century ethnic divisions between those women buried with spindle whorls and those accompanied by other weaving equipment.In addition, the recording of the positioning of objects allows us to iden tify tentatively those few male burials that have spearheads orientated towards their feet as being ethnically linked to contem porary burial rituals prevalent in northern Europe, particularly in the kingdoms of Frankia across the Channel.

Advancing the potential of interdisciplinary research
The ASKED project has demonstrated the value of applying computer technology to the cataloguing of burial data.Anglo Saxon burials are discrete contexts and are rich in archaeological information.It is these same factors that make them an appropriate category of data fr om which to develop both standards and techniques for the online dissemination of information.Unlike many other forms of archaeological evidence, they are inherently coherent and closed.By listing these dead people, to gether with their grave inventories and the structures built around their graves, ASKED can support a huge range of archaeological questions, including examinations of rit ual behaviour, explorations of shifting gender identities, and analyses of exchange and consumption of materials or objects.The database format allows for the bolting on of additional datasets, for example analysis of skeletal remains that have potential to expand our understanding of population, disease and longevity among these communities.
Overall, the longer-term vision for the project is to unify all of the disparate strands of the data to facilitate different theoretical approaches and thereby to broaden research agendas in Early Anglo Saxon archaeology.Through the use of computer technology, it is also possible to create links to data generated by other dis ciplines, for example geographical infor mation science and linguistics.Although such links may have been considered by earlier researchers, they were essentially unrealizable before now.It is with this prospect in mind that a three-year research project, called Beyond the Tribal Hidage and fun ded by the Leverhulme Trust, began in September 2006.This will apply the methodologies developed in the crea tion of ASKED to explore the evidence for the processes underpinning the emergence of the early kingdoms of Kent, Sussex and Wessex in southern Britain in the post Roman period.We will expand the corpus of Early Anglo-Saxon burials to list all individuals known archaeologically from south of the Thames.By mapping this data alongside evidence from contemporary set tlements, the archaeology of the late Roman period, and selected information from the other disciplines noted above, we will for the first time be able to investigate the full range of information available to us in a more systematic and comprehensive man ner.This will essentially be a comparative study that will explore in depth the origins and subsequent evolution of three rather different early kingdoms.We expect to be able to detect the emergence through time of core areas of wealth, which contributed

Figure 1
Figure1The distribution of Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and isolated burials in eastern Kent recorded in ASKED .

Figure 2
Figure2An etching showing the site of early excavations by the Reverend Brian Fa ussett in the sand quarry at Gilton, Ken t.From 1757 to 1777 he excavated many Anglo-Saxon barrows in Ken t, amassing a huge private collection of gra ve goods that were post humously published in 1856 by Ch arles Roach Smith as the Inventorium Sepulchrale, fr om wh ere this image is reproduced.

Figure 3
Figure 3 Aerial photo (from the north east} of the cemetery at Eastry Up down, wh ich was partially excavated in two cam paigns by the Kent Archaeological Rescue Un it and a student excavation directed by S. C. Hawkes (courtesy of the University of Cambridge Air Photography Un it).

Figure 4
Figure 4 One of the authors measuring artefacts fr om the cemetery of Dover Buckland cemetery, now archived in the British Museum.

Figure 6
Figure 6 A gilt-silver Nydam-style brooch fr om Gillingh am, recently exca vated by Pre-ConstructArchaeology.Dress ornaments of this type are common in Early Anglo-Saxon burials and can pro vide important inform ation regarding, for example, fa shion, technology and trade.(Courtesy of ?re-ConstructArchaeology)