Brookes, Stuart James; (2003) Landscapes, communities and exchange: A reassessment of Anglo-Saxon economics and social change AD 400-900 with special reference to Kent. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D.), University College London (United Kingdom).

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Abstract

This thesis examines archaeological and historical evidence for the socio-economic organisation of the kingdom of East Kent as a territorial and social system during the Early to Middle Anglo-Saxon. Explicit archaeological and theoretical frameworks are considered to propose a hierarchical model of the spatial organisation of communities as a way of providing a micro-economic case-study of state formation. It is argued that the specific heuristic device of exchange relations, in combination with locational theory, allows for a more a synthetic perspective on the spatial patterning of past action and inter alia the dynamic forces underpinning the rise of kings and kingdoms. Within the spatial remit of this study, an innovative methodology is advocated. In addition to other classical economic and geographical analyses applied, the distributional approach examines the frequency or quantity of commodities with respect to units of economic consumption, such as individuals, households and communities. By examining the saturation levels of community consumption as represented in burial assemblages, a hierarchical model of value regimes underlying exchange sub-systems is suggested. Taken in combination with an analysis of the geographical organisation of settlement, this approach allows for a thesis on the way regional space was socially and spatially constructed in ways that restricted and monopolised allocative and authoritative resources. Correlations between spatially-distributed phenomena and features of the physical environment are assessed in order to posit a thesis on the social dynamic in land-holding underlying the territorial and spatially-definable conditions of reproduction. An assessment is made of the importance of restrictions on the movement of people in social formation, by analysing the relationships between routes of communication, the mortuary landscape, and the visual experience of movement. Finally, consideration of these phenomena with respect to changing exchange systems provides a model of Early Medieval state formation.

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