Population replacement or acculturation? An archaeological perspective on population and migration in post-Roman Britain. In: H.L.C. Tristram (ed.). The Celtic Englishes III (Anglistische Forschungen, 324). Heidelberg: Winter 2003. 13-28. (original) (raw)

The traditional view, based on historical sources and derived from 19th century ideas on ethnic and national origins, has been that the native Romano-British population was replaced by immigrant Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century AD. Some historians and archaeologists of the early and mid-20th century had doubted this model, but a new debate on this question has run since the first half of the 1980s, stimulated as much by theoretical reconsiderations as by some new evidence. The greatest stumbling block to the replacement model is the new population estimates for Roman Britain, suggesting a population between 3 and 6 million. Such a substantial population can hardly have disappeared suddenly within a few decades; and there is, indeed, no archaeological evidence of catastrophic events (plague, famine, ethnic cleansing) which might have caused such disappearance. On the contrary, new palaeobotanic evidence implies substantial population continuity in the sub-Roman period. The majority view in Anglo-Saxon archaeology now is that much, perhaps most, of the Romano-British population survived and underwent a process of acculturation which may also be found in other 'Dark Age' cases of empire collapse. As a result, Britons would appear as 'Anglo-Saxons' in the archaeological record. This model would have profound implications for the ethnogenetic, social and linguistic processes of the post-Roman period in England.