Christian Lewis

There’s no place like home: explorations of death and life in the landscapes of the Isle of Wight

Supervisor: Professor David Hinton

Abstract:

My project examines the wider context of death and burial in Early Anglo-Saxon
England. Centred upon the Isle of Wight, it is designed to present a social biography
of an island at a time of great change by exploring the possible reasons why, for
example, local communities might have selected sites for the disposal of the dead
and how these locations may have been socially meaningful.

Eighteen Early Anglo-Saxon burial and cemetery locations have been discovered
on the Isle of Wight. Local mortuary behaviour is highly diverse and features
large mixed-rite cemeteries, possible deviant graves, primary mound burials,
smaller community cemeteries, secondary monument reuse, and an example of an
associative burial. Sarah Semple recently highlighted how the landscape has ‘long
held a special place in Anglo-Saxon and early medieval scholarship’ but curiously,
very few researchers have elected to explore the landscape context of death and
burial. This paper will discuss my progress toward redressing this paucity and will
briefly illustrate a key theme of my research – the notion of familiarity.

email: c.lewis@soton.ac.uk