This is a bit of a departure from my usual posts, but bear with me as it’s about a long-term special interest of mine and I’m doing something outside of my comfort zone.

I’ve been involved with the Theoretical Archaeology Group for a while now (you must have noticed if you follow me on fedi :3), and it’s gradually pushed me toward a research interest I’ve been meaning to do something serious with: what early Anglo-Saxon burials can tell us about gender, and specifically the ones that don’t fit neatly into the interpretive boxes archaeologists have traditionally used.

The short version is that when osteological analysis suggests a buried individual was male but their grave goods are those typically associated with women (or vice versa), the standard move has been to call it an “anomaly”, rather than engage with the more obvious possibility that the binary interpretive framework itself might be the problem.

The case that got me interested is Grave 142 at St Anne’s Road (Eastbourne), a cemetery in use from the 5th to the 7th century. The skeletal markers suggest the individual was male, while the grave goods include around 40 beads, two brooches, and a set of keys. In early Anglo-Saxon burial contexts, keys are almost exclusively found with female-sexed individuals, functioning as a symbol of domestic authority and household management, and brooches carry similar gendered associations. This isn’t really an ambiguous grave, as someone made deliberate choices about how this person was buried, and those choices expressed a social identity that didn’t map onto biological sex in any simple way.

There’s a growing body of archaeological work, drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and more recently on trans studies approaches to the material record, that takes assemblages like this seriously as evidence rather than error. The MOLA team have done some really interesting work along these lines for early medieval London, but the Sussex material hasn’t been pulled together in quite the same way.

I’m planning to write it up properly for Sussex Archaeological Collections, the Sussex Archaeological Society’s journal, which publishes peer-reviewed work from both academic and non-academic contributors. It’s going to take a while as there are primary excavation reports I need to track down, and the theoretical framework needs to be handled carefully, because the goal isn’t to project modern identities onto people who died 1,500 years ago, but to argue that “anomaly” is itself a theoretically loaded conclusion and that the Sussex evidence deserves a more honest look.

More on this when there’s more to say, but if you happen to know anything about early Anglo-Saxon burial in Sussex, or have thoughts on gender archaeology more generally, I’d genuinely love to hear from you, as archaeological paper writing is fairly new to me…