No Saxon invasion?

[authun]

Perhaps in 1500 years time a scientist may be able to tell us where these individuals came from but would they be able to tell us anything about what these folk considered to be there own individual cultural and ethnic identity and of course the issue would be even more clouded if they just happened to have 'grave goods' buried with them!

Yes that's a good example of an ethnographic approach, hence Halsall's example about Goths buried in Spain. If you want to know about Visigothic Spain, study the Visigoths in Spain uncluttered by assumptions as to their origins. The same with the Anglo Saxons in England. Study them in England without reference to their origins. Relying on origins leads to all sorts of nonsense creeping in such as the current tradition of the May Queen is a remnant of of the Earth Mother mentioned by Tacitus, in relation to the Angles in Germania and that the Maypole is a depiction of the Irminsul. If Tacitus was correct and the Continental Angles did worship Herthum, we should not assume that they worshipped the same in England for there is no evidence of this deity here. Better to study what scant evidence there is for Anglo Saxon paganism and resist the temptation to fill gaps with speculative imports. They may afterall have changed some of their beliefs.

However, ethnography is only one field of study. Settlement history is just as valid and just as interesting. Ethnographers are right to point out that paternal lineages (yDNA) do not define the ethnicity of a group from an ethnographic viewpoint, but they do play a part in the ethnogenesis of that group. yDNA is valuable as remains largely unchanged as it is passed down and hence it is a good tracking tool, but it doesn't tell you anything about the nature of the society which may be quite different from the society of the forefathers.

However, ethnography won't tell us anything about why Abergele shows a frequency of Eb3 at something like 20 times higher than the rest of the UK or many parts of western Europe. It may be an interesting aside to do with the Roman army and the presence of north Africans or it may be potentially more useful in helping us to understand the expansion routes of the copper workers. Miners appear to be one of those groups who migrate because it is specialist work and because farmers are not easily persuaded to give up farming their land and adopt a new lifestyle. I personally find the movements of such peoples just as interesting as the political structures of the societies that they move into.

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authun