Links to Late Antiquity

This publication began as an AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, 'Links to Late Antiquity: Understanding Contacts on the Western Seaboard in the 5th to 7th Centuries', completed at Newcastle University in 2016. This revised version presents a broad-scale discussion of the evidence for contacts and connections in the Atlantic Seaboard region, based principally on ceramics. It extends knowledge of a category of material with a long history of scholarship in Britain and Ireland: amphorae and fineware vessels of East Mediterranean origin. The presence of this imported pottery at sites in western Britain, such as Tintagel in Cornwall, has frequently been used to suggest direct links between post-Roman Britain and the Byzantine World. This work offers an alternative position - that the wares reflect active and evolving networks of trans-shipment and exchange operating in the Atlantic Seaboard region between the fifth and seventh century. This first examination of parallel French, Spanish and Portuguese publications provides a fresh perspective on this important group of artefacts for understanding early medieval Britain.