The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy, Near Winchester, Hampshire

by Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, Guy Grainger, E. Biddulph

This volume provides a report on the excavation of an important Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy in Hampshire. The excavations uncovered 94 inhumation graves and 46 cremations within an area of approximately 900 square metres, but many others remained inaccessible to the excavators and the cemetery may have contained twice this number of burials in total. The cemetery was excavated in 1961-2 by the distinguished Anglo-Saxon scholar Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, but Mrs Hawkes' report remained unpublished at the time of her death in 1999. The present editors have drawn together all the chapters and drawings left substantially complete by Mrs Hawkes, including an introduction to the site, a detailed catalogue of burials, a report on the human bone, a gazetteer of Anglo-Saxon sites in Hampshire, and a small number of specialist reports.

Hardcover

First published November 1, 2003

Reviews

[Sabrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very interesting, with a great deal of detail particularly on the inhumations (which was what I was focusing on here for my research) and I really appreciated that most of the graves had accompanying plans - guess it is true that a picture paints a thousand words. I did feel, however, that they could have more explicitly explained what kind of statistical analyses they did with their data, as I was sorely confused when I reached the section on osteoarthritis, and had to do my own Chi-squared test to allow myself to move on.

Sometimes the language used was a bit off-putting. Not all phrases I picked up on were explicitly problematic, but they gave me an unpleasant niggling feeling of discomfort that I managed to detangle with further thought. For example, on p.153:

The sexing of these skeletons produced no obvious anomalies such as Amazonian 'ladies' with spears or effeminate 'gentlemen' with strings of beads.

I have no idea why they felt the need to put ladies and gentlemen in quote marks, nor why they spoke of such "anomalies" with such disparagement. Also I wonder if anomaly is even a good term to use, as such language reinforces dichotomous thinking that gender archaeology has worked hard to challenge. Anyway. Another example, p.172:

It is a lesion known to occur when a woman seeks to resist the forcible separation of her thighs during the hurly-burly of a brutal rape.

"Hurly-burly"? Are they being serious? Makes rape sound like some kind of playground tumble. Also I found it a little, well, heteronormative that the authors described women as "plodding on" with daily tasks. Would it not have served just as well to say their activities were less physically violent than the men's, rather than using "plodding on" with all its connotations of dull, menial, less-valued work?

At times it was also surprising when the writing switched from academia-style, formal language to extremely casual language, such as on p.172:

Burial 57(M), the miserable little man with a load of pathology, who has a small linear depression about 24 x 4mm...

I burst out laughing, especially when a few lines down was mentioned a "sleazy brawl", just a couple words before detailing an absence of periostitis. Maybe the authors were trying to liven up an academic piece?

Overall though, I did enjoy this book, being interested enough to read sections that did not relate to my dissertation but were inviting nonetheless.