Who Was Buried in England's Fifth- and Early Sixth-Century “Anglo-Saxon” Cemeteries?

This paper will reconsider the paradigms of ethnicity and migration use by archaeologists and historians to identify and describe the early medieval burial communities excavated in lowland Britain.  A reexamination of burial practices and grave goods, combined with the study of stable isotopes in human skeletal material suggest that large numbers of indigenous people in post-Roman Britain were inventing and adopting new identities that we call “Anglo-Saxon,” but which may, in the century after Rome’s fall, not had much to do with actual “Anglo-Saxons.”