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TIMES
Judged by the norms of Romano-British archaeology, the post-Roman period looks like a catastrophe from which it took centuries to recover, and whose study is made frustratingly difficult because of this so-called 'cliff edge', after which we lack dateable mass-produced pottery and coinage.See also:
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It looked to her as if most of Britain's population, descended from earlier inhabitants, continued to farm the same landscapes in much the same ways as their ancestors had done over preceding centuries. Additionally, assimilation of immigrants among existing communities is suggested by studies of isotopes in dental enamel from burials of the period. Incomers are only identifiable by these means: they are otherwise invisible - having been buried in the same orientation, with the same rites, and with the same kinds of grave goods as their neighbours, among whom they are intermingled.
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There is little evidence of landscape restructuring or of Romano-British communities being reduced to servile status by a new Germanic elite. Instead, most households lived in the same kind of houses as their neighbours, used the same kind of goods, and farmed the same patterns of fields in the same sorts of ways.
[...] brooches that look Germanic may have been imported initially, but became increasingly popular and were then reproduced by local craftsmen, evolving over the 6th and 7th centuries into better designed and more complicated insular forms that were worn across England: an index of regional taste and fashion, not of immigrant ethnicity.
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Increasingly, linguists are characterising English as a contact language - emerging from the interaction of different languages - rather than the imposed language of a dominant class.
Comment: See also: