“…15 Williams 2016. 16 Gilchrist 2008;Maldonado 2013. 17 Hall 2001Thomas 2012. and Cowdery's Down (Lyminge, Kent), 18 targeted investigation aimed at improving understanding of cropmark sites (Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire), 19 detailed survey and reconnaissance work offering a landscape-scale perspective on the evolution of documented royal centres (Rendlesham, Suffolk), 20 and the recognition of new sites through the re-evaluation of old and neglected datasets (Benson, Oxfordshire).…”
THE GREAT HALL complex represents one of the most distinctive and evocative expressions of the Anglo-Saxon settlement record, and is widely cited as a metaphor for the emergence of kingship in early medieval England. Yet interpretation of these sites remains underdeveloped and heavily weighted towards the excavated findings from the well-known site of Yeavering in Northumberland. Inspired by the results of recent excavations at Lyminge, Kent, this paper undertakes a detailed comparative interrogation of three great hall complexes in Kent, and exploits this new regional perspective to advance our understanding of the agency and embodied meanings of these settlements as 'theatres of power'. Explored through the thematic prisms of place, social memory and monumental hybridity, this examination leads to a new appreciation of the involvement of great hall sites in the genealogical strategies of 7th-century royal dynasties and a fresh perspective on how this remarkable, yet short-lived, monumental idiom was adapted to harness the symbolic capital of Romanitas.
262
“…15 Williams 2016. 16 Gilchrist 2008;Maldonado 2013. 17 Hall 2001Thomas 2012. and Cowdery's Down (Lyminge, Kent), 18 targeted investigation aimed at improving understanding of cropmark sites (Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire), 19 detailed survey and reconnaissance work offering a landscape-scale perspective on the evolution of documented royal centres (Rendlesham, Suffolk), 20 and the recognition of new sites through the re-evaluation of old and neglected datasets (Benson, Oxfordshire).…”
THE GREAT HALL complex represents one of the most distinctive and evocative expressions of the Anglo-Saxon settlement record, and is widely cited as a metaphor for the emergence of kingship in early medieval England. Yet interpretation of these sites remains underdeveloped and heavily weighted towards the excavated findings from the well-known site of Yeavering in Northumberland. Inspired by the results of recent excavations at Lyminge, Kent, this paper undertakes a detailed comparative interrogation of three great hall complexes in Kent, and exploits this new regional perspective to advance our understanding of the agency and embodied meanings of these settlements as 'theatres of power'. Explored through the thematic prisms of place, social memory and monumental hybridity, this examination leads to a new appreciation of the involvement of great hall sites in the genealogical strategies of 7th-century royal dynasties and a fresh perspective on how this remarkable, yet short-lived, monumental idiom was adapted to harness the symbolic capital of Romanitas.
262
“…130 Similar arguments regarding the use of burial architecture to underline particular familial relations and the establishment of lineage have been made for other Pictish and early medieval cemeteries more generally. At Lundin Links, Fife, Howard Williams has suggested that the acts of containing multiple dead within single monuments and the linking of particular monuments through new acts of building created genealogies through architecture : Williams 2007. Maldonado (2013 has also suggested that cemeteries in general continually reforged relationships between the living and the dead, perhaps even creating a form of distributed personhood where the dead were considered an active part of living society.…”
“…Hunter 2007: 38–42). The cemeteries at Rhynie and Newton of Collessie are of a form closely dated to the fifth to early seventh centuries cal AD (Maldonado 2013: 6; Mitchell & Noble 2017: fig 15). More specifically, one of the square barrows at Rhynie has been directly dated to the fifth or early sixth century AD (Noble et al 2019).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Weapon burials are rare in Ireland and northern Britain (e.g. O'Brien 2009: 136–38; O'Brien & Bhreathnach 2011; Maldonado 2013; O'Sullivan et al . 2014: 283–99), but other categories of material evidence still testify to a warrior ideology and its materialisation in regionally specific ways.…”
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