ABSTRACT
The remit of this paper1 was briefly to summarise the ‘past, present and future’ of Anglo-Saxon settlement studies. I will begin by doing what archaeologists do best and look to the past – back to 1974, to be precise, to the publication of a volume of conference proceedings entitled Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Landscape, edited by Trevor Rowley. The volume contained an article by Keith Wade entitled, ‘Whither Anglo-Saxon settlement archaeology?’, the emphasis of which was firmly on issues of sampling and whether the handful of Anglo-Saxon settlements which had been excavated at that time could be considered to be in any way representative. Wade complained that ‘any excavated settlement of the Anglo-Saxon period appears to gain national importance overnight. This is hardly surprising when one can count the number of excavated early Saxon settlements on the fingers of one hand and the middle Saxon settlements on the other’ (1974: 87). He went on to observe, rightly, that such a tiny sample, whose distribution was anything but random, was bound to lead to the formulation of simplistic generalisations which, once established, would be hard to shake – for example, the belief that these settlements were invariably on light, marginal soils, or that only ‘failed’ settlements were available for excavation, with ‘successful’ sites lying beneath present-day villages (see below).
