WEBVTT
00:00:07.719 --> 00:00:11.300
Hi there. I'm Barbara Newman, the new editor
00:00:11.300 --> 00:00:15.460
of Speculum, a journal of medieval studies. Welcome
00:00:15.460 --> 00:00:18.739
to Speculum Spotlight, our quarterly podcast
00:00:18.739 --> 00:00:21.579
in collaboration with the Multicultural Middle
00:00:21.579 --> 00:00:25.699
Ages. Each episode is designed to bring you behind
00:00:25.699 --> 00:00:28.699
the scenes of an article in our current issue.
00:00:29.140 --> 00:00:32.380
This month's episode deals with the Medieval
00:00:32.380 --> 00:00:36.000
Academy's 2025 presidential address by Robin
00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:40.039
Fleming. It's also a sequel to our April conversation
00:00:40.039 --> 00:00:43.500
about burial archaeology in the early Middle
00:00:43.500 --> 00:00:48.159
Ages. Co -authors Robin Fleming, Sam Leggett,
00:00:48.159 --> 00:00:51.719
and Emma Smith have investigated an early 5th
00:00:51.719 --> 00:00:55.320
century cemetery in the English village of Alton
00:00:55.320 --> 00:00:57.740
on the edge of the South Downs in Hampshire.
00:00:58.060 --> 00:01:01.979
Using bioarchaeological evidence from bones and
00:01:01.979 --> 00:01:05.579
teeth, They're able to obtain remarkably precise
00:01:05.579 --> 00:01:09.519
findings about the diet of individuals buried
00:01:09.519 --> 00:01:12.900
at Alton, their state of health, and even the
00:01:12.900 --> 00:01:16.659
ages at which they migrated from wetland ecosystems
00:01:16.659 --> 00:01:21.560
to the drier territory of the South Downs. Despite
00:01:21.560 --> 00:01:24.599
the complete absence of texts from this period,
00:01:25.129 --> 00:01:28.049
An analysis of the Alton skeletons and grave
00:01:28.049 --> 00:01:31.930
goods enables us to challenge older grand narratives
00:01:31.930 --> 00:01:35.909
about barbarian invasions and the fall of the
00:01:35.909 --> 00:01:39.730
Roman Empire. Instead of military incursions
00:01:39.730 --> 00:01:43.629
or dramatic cultural change, the cemetery instead
00:01:43.629 --> 00:01:47.609
tells a tale of individual migration, shifts
00:01:47.609 --> 00:01:51.329
in the agricultural regime, and consequent food
00:01:51.329 --> 00:01:55.310
insecurity. with a sad preponderance of youthful
00:01:55.310 --> 00:01:59.790
deaths. The host and producer of this episode
00:01:59.790 --> 00:02:03.010
is Jonathan Correa Reyes, an assistant professor
00:02:03.010 --> 00:02:07.510
of English at Clemson University. John interviews
00:02:07.510 --> 00:02:11.169
two of the three co -authors. Robin Fleming,
00:02:11.330 --> 00:02:14.229
past president of the Medieval Academy of America,
00:02:14.569 --> 00:02:17.569
is a professor of history at Boston College.
00:02:18.169 --> 00:02:21.129
A former MacArthur fellow, she has published
00:02:21.129 --> 00:02:24.490
several books on early medieval England, including,
00:02:24.669 --> 00:02:28.750
most recently, The Material Fall of Roman Britain,
00:02:28.930 --> 00:02:36.069
300 -525 CE. Dr. Sam Leggett is a lecturer in
00:02:36.069 --> 00:02:39.669
computational archaeology at the University of
00:02:39.669 --> 00:02:43.650
Edinburgh. She uses osteological and funerary
00:02:43.650 --> 00:02:47.509
evidence to investigate diet and mobility across
00:02:47.509 --> 00:02:51.270
Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. With
00:02:51.270 --> 00:02:54.729
her co -author Emma Smith, Robin and Sam have
00:02:54.729 --> 00:02:58.729
written Rethinking Grand Narratives, Mobility,
00:02:58.830 --> 00:03:02.629
Diet, and Health in a Small Corner of Early Medieval
00:03:02.629 --> 00:03:06.030
Hampshire. You can read this article in the July
00:03:06.030 --> 00:03:10.939
2025 issue of Speculum. For now, let's listen
00:03:10.939 --> 00:03:17.479
to their conversation. Welcome, Robin. Welcome,
00:03:17.620 --> 00:03:20.919
Sam. It's great to have you with us. In this
00:03:20.919 --> 00:03:23.379
piece, you discuss three grand narratives about
00:03:23.379 --> 00:03:26.080
early medieval England that need to be reconsidered.
00:03:26.259 --> 00:03:29.400
So, to get us started, what is a grand narrative?
00:03:30.079 --> 00:03:32.419
So I think as the historian, I think I'll take
00:03:32.419 --> 00:03:34.479
that question. And I think Sam will be happy
00:03:34.479 --> 00:03:36.520
that I take that question. The grand narratives
00:03:36.520 --> 00:03:39.340
are very useful, right? We can't do without them
00:03:39.340 --> 00:03:41.620
in history, particularly those of us who teach,
00:03:41.759 --> 00:03:44.800
because you need a kind of big story to tell
00:03:44.800 --> 00:03:46.979
over the course of the semester or a year. Or
00:03:46.979 --> 00:03:48.860
for those of us who write books, you need a big
00:03:48.860 --> 00:03:51.879
story to tell across the trajectory of a book.
00:03:52.509 --> 00:03:55.610
So I'm not opposed to grand narratives, but I
00:03:55.610 --> 00:03:57.310
think there are a lot of grand narratives that
00:03:57.310 --> 00:04:00.550
we tell that don't necessarily match the evidence
00:04:00.550 --> 00:04:03.330
that we now have. We have new kinds of evidence
00:04:03.330 --> 00:04:06.469
coming to the fore that suggest to us that grand
00:04:06.469 --> 00:04:10.129
narratives that we depend on, which are written
00:04:10.129 --> 00:04:14.310
based on written evidence, are not correct. And
00:04:14.310 --> 00:04:18.069
so the big stories of the political fall of Rome.
00:04:18.759 --> 00:04:22.779
or the barbarian invasions, so -called, are two
00:04:22.779 --> 00:04:25.459
of the grand narratives that we tell a lot in
00:04:25.459 --> 00:04:28.459
the classes that we teach. But I think that Sam
00:04:28.459 --> 00:04:30.240
and my work, along with other people's work,
00:04:30.259 --> 00:04:33.180
has shown that those two narratives really need
00:04:33.180 --> 00:04:35.740
to be thought about harder to understand what
00:04:35.740 --> 00:04:40.920
it was like to live in the period. Thank you,
00:04:40.920 --> 00:04:43.240
Robin. As you mentioned, these grand narratives
00:04:43.240 --> 00:04:46.379
are useful analytical tools for us as we think
00:04:46.379 --> 00:04:49.160
about and guide students through thinking about
00:04:49.160 --> 00:04:52.459
periods in the past. As a follow -up question,
00:04:52.699 --> 00:04:56.019
what are the stakes of allowing these narratives
00:04:56.019 --> 00:04:59.560
to go unchallenged, especially when, as your
00:04:59.560 --> 00:05:01.899
article shows, for example, the archaeological
00:05:01.899 --> 00:05:07.019
record tells a different story? Big problems
00:05:07.019 --> 00:05:09.839
is a lot of our grand narratives are relics of
00:05:09.839 --> 00:05:13.040
histories past. And a lot of the stories we tell
00:05:13.040 --> 00:05:15.079
are the same stories that were being told in
00:05:15.079 --> 00:05:18.120
the 19th century, right? And so in particular,
00:05:18.139 --> 00:05:21.540
British history was told from the vantage point
00:05:21.540 --> 00:05:25.040
of imperial history, colonial history. There
00:05:25.040 --> 00:05:27.519
was a kind of racialist view. in these histories.
00:05:27.720 --> 00:05:32.220
And the Anglo -Saxons, the early people settled
00:05:32.220 --> 00:05:34.800
in England, are implicated in these racialist
00:05:34.800 --> 00:05:37.420
narratives. And so if we don't think hard about
00:05:37.420 --> 00:05:39.939
why we tell the stories that we tell, and we
00:05:39.939 --> 00:05:41.759
don't think about the history of the histories
00:05:41.759 --> 00:05:44.500
that we tell, we end up getting trapped in older
00:05:44.500 --> 00:05:48.879
narratives that perpetuate older sort of racist,
00:05:48.939 --> 00:05:51.600
imperialist narratives that I think we don't
00:05:51.600 --> 00:05:54.899
believe anymore. In a way, this nostalgic imperialism
00:05:54.899 --> 00:05:57.079
you point towards has been making a comeback
00:05:57.079 --> 00:05:59.920
in recent decades. I'm thinking, for example,
00:05:59.920 --> 00:06:03.040
of appeals to the Anglo -Saxons as the foundation
00:06:03.040 --> 00:06:06.379
of British and even American identity. And one
00:06:06.379 --> 00:06:08.720
of the strange things about British history is
00:06:08.720 --> 00:06:11.740
British history begins in the early 5th century.
00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:14.100
It doesn't begin in the Roman period, even though
00:06:14.100 --> 00:06:16.019
the Roman period is a period that generates a
00:06:16.019 --> 00:06:20.000
lot of written sources. English history begins
00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:23.379
with the Anglo -Saxons, and that's a relic of
00:06:23.379 --> 00:06:26.639
19th century imperialist and racialist ideologies,
00:06:26.819 --> 00:06:28.939
right? We just ignore Rome because we don't want
00:06:28.939 --> 00:06:31.399
to be anybody else's empire. We want to be in
00:06:31.399 --> 00:06:33.759
charge of things ourselves. To turn more specifically
00:06:33.759 --> 00:06:36.600
to your study, you are working in Alton Cemetery.
00:06:36.879 --> 00:06:39.519
Could you contextualize this cemetery for us?
00:06:40.029 --> 00:06:44.050
Sure. So if we look at the evidence that we have
00:06:44.050 --> 00:06:47.449
now that we didn't have 30 years ago, much of
00:06:47.449 --> 00:06:50.449
that evidence provided by either new excavations
00:06:50.449 --> 00:06:53.430
or by the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which
00:06:53.430 --> 00:06:58.670
is a program that has allowed us to capture a
00:06:58.670 --> 00:07:01.490
lot of the evidence that is found by amateur
00:07:01.490 --> 00:07:04.949
metal detectors. So if we look at that evidence,
00:07:05.189 --> 00:07:08.029
what we can see is that there's a period in the
00:07:08.029 --> 00:07:10.529
5th century when our cemetery was founded in
00:07:10.529 --> 00:07:13.790
which there are both new people coming in from
00:07:13.790 --> 00:07:16.449
the continent and lots of lots of people who
00:07:16.449 --> 00:07:19.149
are related to the old Romano -British population.
00:07:19.629 --> 00:07:24.069
And so it's within this context of both natives
00:07:24.069 --> 00:07:27.709
and newcomers that our cemetery is founded. As
00:07:27.709 --> 00:07:30.089
I was reading your piece, what was interesting,
00:07:30.209 --> 00:07:32.709
at least for me, was the focus on individual
00:07:32.709 --> 00:07:35.889
histories. One way to destabilize these grand
00:07:35.889 --> 00:07:38.889
narratives is to turn from the macro to the micro.
00:07:39.170 --> 00:07:41.790
You speak a lot about the agency of the people
00:07:41.790 --> 00:07:44.629
buried at Alton, and how much of their individual
00:07:44.629 --> 00:07:47.529
histories we can rebuild using the archaeological
00:07:47.529 --> 00:07:52.209
record. Can you talk to us a bit about the importance
00:07:52.209 --> 00:07:55.009
or some of the tensions of extrapolating these
00:07:55.009 --> 00:07:58.490
macro and micro histories? So I'm going to start
00:07:58.490 --> 00:08:01.129
and then I'm going to let Sam finish this. And
00:08:01.129 --> 00:08:03.370
so for me, I would say if you think back to the
00:08:03.370 --> 00:08:06.250
grand narratives and you think about the way
00:08:06.250 --> 00:08:08.949
one of the grand narratives about. barbarian
00:08:08.949 --> 00:08:11.870
migrations is oftentimes this notion that there
00:08:11.870 --> 00:08:15.230
are these big war bands on the move, and somehow
00:08:15.230 --> 00:08:17.889
it's an event rather than something that happens
00:08:17.889 --> 00:08:19.370
over the course of a couple of hundred years.
00:08:20.170 --> 00:08:22.889
You miss the individuals who are part of whatever
00:08:22.889 --> 00:08:25.410
it is that is going on. And so if you look at
00:08:25.410 --> 00:08:28.350
individuals, and we can tell through new scientific
00:08:28.350 --> 00:08:30.930
methods whether individuals are moving or not,
00:08:31.069 --> 00:08:33.350
we have a quite different story. And Sam can
00:08:33.350 --> 00:08:36.330
speak to what we can tell about migration in
00:08:36.330 --> 00:08:38.519
this period. if we look at individuals rather
00:08:38.519 --> 00:08:41.399
than the aggregate. Yeah, no, exactly. So in
00:08:41.399 --> 00:08:44.759
bioarchaeology, it tends to be dominated by the
00:08:44.759 --> 00:08:47.200
ancient DNA people. And they often call themselves
00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:49.679
like pop gen, so population genetics. And they
00:08:49.679 --> 00:08:51.600
like to look at the really, really big level.
00:08:51.740 --> 00:08:53.460
And by looking at DNA, you're really looking
00:08:53.460 --> 00:08:55.940
at sort of the aggregation of people's entire
00:08:55.940 --> 00:08:58.659
sort of, you know, family tree history. And so
00:08:58.659 --> 00:09:00.899
I think that often distorts what we're talking
00:09:00.899 --> 00:09:03.259
about in this period. And I've got a lot of beef
00:09:03.259 --> 00:09:05.960
with how they tend to frame these narratives.
00:09:06.159 --> 00:09:09.279
And as a stable isotope person, what I like to
00:09:09.279 --> 00:09:11.679
look at is those individual narratives. And if
00:09:12.159 --> 00:09:14.659
individual people within specific cemeteries
00:09:14.659 --> 00:09:17.519
move during their lifetimes or not whereas these
00:09:17.519 --> 00:09:20.720
larger narratives both historically and in terms
00:09:20.720 --> 00:09:23.399
of DNA tend to talk about you know huge migrations
00:09:23.399 --> 00:09:26.080
and big arrows on maps but we can go okay no
00:09:26.080 --> 00:09:28.600
this lady buried with these particular brooches
00:09:28.600 --> 00:09:32.480
moved once twice three times in her life and
00:09:32.480 --> 00:09:34.179
now we're getting to the resolution where you
00:09:34.179 --> 00:09:36.279
can say All right, actually, at the age of two,
00:09:36.360 --> 00:09:38.220
she was born near the site. At the age of, say,
00:09:38.240 --> 00:09:39.899
seven or eight, she moved away. She moved to
00:09:39.899 --> 00:09:42.100
somewhere that looked a bit like this. And then
00:09:42.100 --> 00:09:44.779
by the time she died and was buried back at Alton,
00:09:44.940 --> 00:09:47.759
you know, she'd sort of moved back again. So
00:09:47.759 --> 00:09:50.759
we can get these really fine -grained life histories
00:09:50.759 --> 00:09:52.720
that I think are so much more interesting than
00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:55.000
just saying X, Y, Z percentage of people were
00:09:55.000 --> 00:09:58.700
local or non -local. You get that real embodied
00:09:58.700 --> 00:10:01.700
experience of the past that is so hard to get
00:10:01.700 --> 00:10:04.820
out in any other way, really. If you look at
00:10:04.820 --> 00:10:07.899
whole cemetery populations, what you can see
00:10:07.899 --> 00:10:10.240
is you can see different people moving at different
00:10:10.240 --> 00:10:12.539
times. And that's not the grand narrative. The
00:10:12.539 --> 00:10:14.340
grand narrative is, I don't know, everybody's
00:10:14.340 --> 00:10:17.059
moving at the same time, right? But what we found
00:10:17.059 --> 00:10:20.059
is that people over generations are moving into
00:10:20.059 --> 00:10:22.690
the settlement. What we're finding is lots of
00:10:22.690 --> 00:10:24.769
women and children are moving in this period.
00:10:24.809 --> 00:10:26.629
That's really not part of the grand narrative.
00:10:26.909 --> 00:10:30.049
And so what we begin to see is a lot of individual
00:10:30.049 --> 00:10:32.429
movement rather than a lot of mass movement.
00:10:32.529 --> 00:10:36.009
And that's a really different story. You mentioned
00:10:36.009 --> 00:10:38.990
Bruges, Sam. What other types of objects have
00:10:38.990 --> 00:10:41.470
you found buried in the graves of Alton Cemetery?
00:10:41.980 --> 00:10:44.179
Yeah, I mean, well, Alton's great because it
00:10:44.179 --> 00:10:47.080
kind of straddles the material culture from the
00:10:47.080 --> 00:10:49.620
late Roman period through to what we often call
00:10:49.620 --> 00:10:52.059
Anglo -Saxon or early medieval, whereas a lot
00:10:52.059 --> 00:10:53.600
of other sites that I've worked on are quite
00:10:53.600 --> 00:10:56.519
definitively or often talked in, again, these
00:10:56.519 --> 00:10:59.399
sort of very clear definitions of this as a new
00:10:59.399 --> 00:11:01.860
material culture. So there's various different
00:11:01.860 --> 00:11:03.740
types of brooch types, and I'll let Robin sort
00:11:03.740 --> 00:11:05.700
of tell you more about that because there's some...
00:11:05.919 --> 00:11:08.840
very interesting sort of subtypes there. We've
00:11:08.840 --> 00:11:11.320
got pottery, weapons, you've really kind of got
00:11:11.320 --> 00:11:15.019
the whole gamut of things that kind of span the
00:11:15.019 --> 00:11:16.720
third, fourth centuries through to the seventh.
00:11:18.489 --> 00:11:21.429
And there's also one of the nice things about
00:11:21.429 --> 00:11:23.409
this cemetery, like a lot of early cemeteries,
00:11:23.429 --> 00:11:26.309
is it's both an inhumation cemetery, so people
00:11:26.309 --> 00:11:28.610
were burying bodies, but it's also a cremation
00:11:28.610 --> 00:11:30.870
cemetery as well. So there's lots of interesting
00:11:30.870 --> 00:11:34.149
pots with the remains of people inside and probably
00:11:34.149 --> 00:11:37.720
animals as well. That hasn't been tested yet.
00:11:38.039 --> 00:11:42.120
So there is a really interesting variety of grave
00:11:42.120 --> 00:11:45.659
goods. And just as an aside, so I'm going to
00:11:45.659 --> 00:11:48.259
be working on this material in a couple of weeks
00:11:48.259 --> 00:11:51.379
in Winchester. And when I was talking to the
00:11:51.379 --> 00:11:54.139
person who's in charge of the stores at Winchester,
00:11:54.240 --> 00:11:56.240
he was very afraid that he would have to take
00:11:56.240 --> 00:11:59.120
a lot of stuff out of the glass cases in the
00:11:59.120 --> 00:12:01.600
museum where people can look at this stuff. But
00:12:01.600 --> 00:12:03.519
the only stuff in the glass cases is the stuff
00:12:03.519 --> 00:12:05.559
that has to do with warfare and men. And there's
00:12:05.559 --> 00:12:08.259
not a single object that has to do with women
00:12:08.259 --> 00:12:11.779
or children. So, which is back to the grand narrative,
00:12:11.899 --> 00:12:14.299
right? I mean, you want your display of Anglo
00:12:14.299 --> 00:12:16.600
-Saxons to be about guys with swords and you
00:12:16.600 --> 00:12:18.759
don't want them to be about other things. So
00:12:18.759 --> 00:12:21.259
I thought that was actually kind of amusing.
00:12:21.740 --> 00:12:24.779
That is not surprising. To focus on the human
00:12:24.779 --> 00:12:27.039
remains for a minute. Sam, you've been talking
00:12:27.039 --> 00:12:29.840
about the kinds of information that can be extracted
00:12:29.840 --> 00:12:32.879
from these bodies. Could you talk to us about
00:12:32.879 --> 00:12:36.259
your process and methods? I'm particularly curious
00:12:36.259 --> 00:12:39.259
about diets and how you access this kind of information.
00:12:39.500 --> 00:12:42.519
And please keep it simple so I can follow along.
00:12:42.980 --> 00:12:45.159
Yeah, no, really good question. And I'll try
00:12:45.159 --> 00:12:47.919
to keep it all nice and family friendly and not
00:12:47.919 --> 00:12:51.440
get too into the chemistry. Essentially, isotopes
00:12:51.440 --> 00:12:54.039
are forms of chemical elements and they've just
00:12:54.039 --> 00:12:55.759
got slightly different molecular weights, which
00:12:55.759 --> 00:12:58.460
means that nerds like me can then measure that.
00:12:58.500 --> 00:12:59.899
You can measure the weights of them when they
00:12:59.899 --> 00:13:01.259
come out, but you don't need to worry too much
00:13:01.259 --> 00:13:03.179
about that. Most people will be kind of familiar
00:13:03.179 --> 00:13:05.480
with the fact that we're carbon -based life forms.
00:13:05.700 --> 00:13:07.919
And so carbon is one of the chemical elements
00:13:07.919 --> 00:13:10.340
we like to hone in on archaeological science
00:13:10.340 --> 00:13:12.399
because, number one, it allows for radiocarbon
00:13:12.399 --> 00:13:15.659
dating. Fantastic. That's great. And also carbon.
00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:18.799
12 and 13 really kind of root us in the landscape.
00:13:18.919 --> 00:13:20.399
And so it's a really useful thing for looking
00:13:20.399 --> 00:13:22.840
at diet because it's linked to the bottom of
00:13:22.840 --> 00:13:24.279
the food chain, the plants that we're eating.
00:13:24.460 --> 00:13:26.820
And particularly for this period and Alton, it's
00:13:26.820 --> 00:13:29.519
really useful for us to tell apart some major
00:13:29.519 --> 00:13:31.840
dietary changes that can happen at the end of
00:13:31.840 --> 00:13:34.059
the Roman period in particular. And we can talk
00:13:34.059 --> 00:13:35.659
about, you know, the hows and the whys of that
00:13:35.659 --> 00:13:39.120
later. But carbon can tell you between particularly
00:13:39.120 --> 00:13:42.580
sort of marine diets and terrestrial, as well
00:13:42.580 --> 00:13:44.259
as if people are kind of eating different types
00:13:44.259 --> 00:13:47.029
of plants that are drought. resistant. And then
00:13:47.029 --> 00:13:48.850
your nitrogen is really linked back to where
00:13:48.850 --> 00:13:51.009
you are in the food chain. So you might read
00:13:51.009 --> 00:13:52.509
in the paper where we sort of talk about people
00:13:52.509 --> 00:13:54.169
having higher nitrogen, meaning they're eating
00:13:54.169 --> 00:13:56.649
more meat or sort of lower nitrogen values. And
00:13:56.649 --> 00:13:58.429
that means they're kind of closer to being modern
00:13:58.429 --> 00:14:01.370
day vegetarians or vegans. And the way we kind
00:14:01.370 --> 00:14:04.169
of get at that is you need relatively well preserved
00:14:04.169 --> 00:14:08.350
bones or teeth, and we want to extract out the
00:14:08.350 --> 00:14:12.139
collagen. So people probably... maybe even taking
00:14:12.139 --> 00:14:14.419
collagen supplements that's a whole other thing
00:14:14.419 --> 00:14:16.159
but you know we want that that's the thing that
00:14:16.159 --> 00:14:18.720
gives our skin and our bones the elasticity and
00:14:18.720 --> 00:14:20.360
sort of the bendiness and that's kind of the
00:14:20.360 --> 00:14:23.120
best bit to get out for for these type of results
00:14:23.120 --> 00:14:25.659
that you want so to do that we have to get rid
00:14:25.659 --> 00:14:27.139
of the mineral part of the bone that helps you
00:14:27.139 --> 00:14:28.899
stand up and is the bit that makes it strong
00:14:28.899 --> 00:14:32.139
so we dissolve the bones and or your tooth roots
00:14:32.139 --> 00:14:34.539
because that's also got collagen in it in weak
00:14:34.539 --> 00:14:38.259
acid to make it springy and squishy. So there's
00:14:38.259 --> 00:14:41.279
a lot of poking bones in acid for weeks on end
00:14:41.279 --> 00:14:43.000
until they're squishy enough because you want
00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:46.220
to do it really gently, right? These are 1500
00:14:46.220 --> 00:14:49.379
year old plus people. You don't want to do it
00:14:49.379 --> 00:14:51.360
too quickly and have it completely lost in the
00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:54.539
acid. And then essentially you go through a whole
00:14:54.539 --> 00:14:58.259
process to then turn that into human soup and
00:14:58.259 --> 00:14:59.960
then you freeze dry it and it looks like cotton
00:14:59.960 --> 00:15:02.440
candy. for an American audience. And that's in
00:15:02.440 --> 00:15:04.379
all of us. That's in your skin, that's in your
00:15:04.379 --> 00:15:06.940
bones. And that was what we can then look at
00:15:06.940 --> 00:15:09.340
and put through a mass spec for dietary information,
00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:11.559
in particular, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur,
00:15:11.779 --> 00:15:14.419
which is linked both to your diet, but also to
00:15:14.419 --> 00:15:16.379
mobility. And we talk a lot about the sulfur
00:15:16.379 --> 00:15:19.080
in terms of wet feet and where people are living.
00:15:19.379 --> 00:15:22.899
And then for mobility, usually apart from sulfur,
00:15:22.940 --> 00:15:24.879
which is a relatively new technique, we want
00:15:24.879 --> 00:15:27.659
to look at people's tooth enamel. So that enamel
00:15:27.659 --> 00:15:31.049
structure. locks in the drinking water signatures
00:15:31.049 --> 00:15:33.330
from the moments that those teeth were being
00:15:33.330 --> 00:15:35.639
formed. So everyone can probably remember when
00:15:35.639 --> 00:15:37.059
they were losing different teeth at different
00:15:37.059 --> 00:15:38.960
times of their life, right? Or when they come
00:15:38.960 --> 00:15:41.100
through, you know, anyone with kids is kind of
00:15:41.100 --> 00:15:44.220
imagining the horror of weaning and things, yeah.
00:15:44.340 --> 00:15:46.480
But that's really useful for us. Find resolution
00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:49.019
from dentistry when these teeth form and things.
00:15:49.100 --> 00:15:50.759
So we can target, you know, teeth to look at
00:15:50.759 --> 00:15:53.759
really, really early life. When somebody's, you
00:15:53.759 --> 00:15:56.419
know, have their third molars, their wisdom teeth
00:15:56.419 --> 00:15:58.019
coming through, that's kind of the latest snapshot
00:15:58.019 --> 00:16:01.450
we can get out of your teeth. And then... So
00:16:01.450 --> 00:16:04.149
I said the oxygen linked to the water and then
00:16:04.149 --> 00:16:05.730
strontium is linked to the bedrock that you're
00:16:05.730 --> 00:16:07.710
living on. You can kind of then imagine we can
00:16:07.710 --> 00:16:09.710
sort of add the layers of are they in sort of
00:16:09.710 --> 00:16:11.669
a warm climate and you're getting sort of heated
00:16:11.669 --> 00:16:13.870
water from living somewhere like the Mediterranean
00:16:13.870 --> 00:16:15.809
if you're a late Roman who's coming to Britain
00:16:15.809 --> 00:16:18.330
or if maybe they've come from somewhere wetter
00:16:18.330 --> 00:16:20.590
and colder, you know, like the upland areas in
00:16:20.590 --> 00:16:23.250
Wales or northern Britain or somewhere else in
00:16:23.250 --> 00:16:24.990
Europe. And so those are kind of what we can
00:16:24.990 --> 00:16:28.470
triangulate to then get a picture of where people
00:16:28.470 --> 00:16:30.690
are living, what they're eating. And that might
00:16:30.690 --> 00:16:33.450
give you hints as to what cultural background
00:16:33.450 --> 00:16:35.350
they come from if they're eating more marine
00:16:35.350 --> 00:16:37.350
stuff or terrestrial things. There's lots of
00:16:37.350 --> 00:16:38.970
nuance there, but hopefully that kind of gives
00:16:38.970 --> 00:16:43.149
you an idea. And one of the things that Sam does
00:16:43.149 --> 00:16:46.590
is the denting where she drills these incremental
00:16:46.590 --> 00:16:50.149
holes so she can basically see what a person
00:16:50.149 --> 00:16:52.549
is eating and where they're living every six
00:16:52.549 --> 00:16:54.669
months of life or every year of life for the
00:16:54.669 --> 00:16:57.649
first 18 years. So that's a level of resolution
00:16:57.649 --> 00:17:01.220
that you don't get in. chronicle sources in the
00:17:01.220 --> 00:17:03.580
early Middle Ages, right? It says, oh, the king
00:17:03.580 --> 00:17:06.000
died this year, but it doesn't say anything about,
00:17:06.119 --> 00:17:09.519
you know, that kind of fine detail of what life
00:17:09.519 --> 00:17:12.019
was actually like for people. So the resolution
00:17:12.019 --> 00:17:14.599
is extraordinary. The king really liked lettuce,
00:17:14.660 --> 00:17:18.579
for example. He was vegetarian for like these
00:17:18.579 --> 00:17:22.799
many months. Something else Sam has found out
00:17:22.799 --> 00:17:24.579
is that actually kings were pretty vegetarian
00:17:24.579 --> 00:17:27.880
in this period. That is interesting. Thank you
00:17:27.880 --> 00:17:30.400
for that explanation, Sam. Thinking specifically
00:17:30.400 --> 00:17:33.180
about your work in Alton, you draw attention
00:17:33.180 --> 00:17:36.460
to six case studies. Could you talk to us about
00:17:36.460 --> 00:17:39.720
why you chose these six individuals and go over
00:17:39.720 --> 00:17:42.980
some of your findings? Yeah, so we highlighted
00:17:42.980 --> 00:17:46.619
three. males and three females as sort of some
00:17:46.619 --> 00:17:48.519
of our key individuals plus some others scattered
00:17:48.519 --> 00:17:50.240
throughout that were just really cool that we'll
00:17:50.240 --> 00:17:53.460
probably bring up in in other parts essentially
00:17:53.460 --> 00:17:57.099
these six people have periods of dietary stress
00:17:57.099 --> 00:17:59.039
and that's what we really wanted to highlight
00:17:59.039 --> 00:18:00.619
as part of this sort of grand narrative that
00:18:00.619 --> 00:18:03.430
people often don't talk about people possibly
00:18:03.430 --> 00:18:06.589
going through famine or other types of dietary
00:18:06.589 --> 00:18:08.650
stress that might be linked to illness. What
00:18:08.650 --> 00:18:11.150
was really interesting for us was the three men
00:18:11.150 --> 00:18:14.150
there all had the exact same sort of stress event
00:18:14.150 --> 00:18:17.529
starting around 10 to 11 years old. And as far
00:18:17.529 --> 00:18:19.470
as we can tell at the moment from the one tooth
00:18:19.470 --> 00:18:21.910
we've sampled up till when that tooth root finishes
00:18:21.910 --> 00:18:26.789
at about 15. And this could be obviously famine
00:18:26.789 --> 00:18:28.250
or something, but the fact that all the men are
00:18:28.250 --> 00:18:30.369
having it at around the time of sort of starting
00:18:30.369 --> 00:18:33.109
puberty, that might be. you know, essentially
00:18:33.109 --> 00:18:34.369
their bodies are really stressed because they're
00:18:34.369 --> 00:18:36.690
going through a growth spurt or something, right?
00:18:37.109 --> 00:18:40.150
But the women are really interesting. So all
00:18:40.150 --> 00:18:41.849
six of these people, we sampled the same tooth.
00:18:41.970 --> 00:18:44.930
So it's the exact same period of late childhood,
00:18:45.109 --> 00:18:46.970
early adolescence that we're looking at. The
00:18:46.970 --> 00:18:50.569
women have that same sort of end bit there, 10
00:18:50.569 --> 00:18:53.309
to 15, having stress, possibly puberty and other
00:18:53.309 --> 00:18:55.390
things, or all six of these people could have
00:18:55.390 --> 00:18:57.509
been going through the same famine, potentially.
00:18:57.769 --> 00:18:59.650
It's very kind of hard to know at this point
00:18:59.650 --> 00:19:02.559
if that's the case. But the women have this earlier
00:19:02.559 --> 00:19:06.079
period of stress that's far more severe than
00:19:06.079 --> 00:19:08.400
what the men are experiencing and it's really
00:19:08.400 --> 00:19:10.700
interesting that it's the women and girls that
00:19:10.700 --> 00:19:13.019
are experiencing that and robin's talked really
00:19:13.019 --> 00:19:15.099
eloquently in the paper about all the reasons
00:19:15.099 --> 00:19:17.720
why that might be you know for what's going on
00:19:17.720 --> 00:19:20.779
in this period and gendered access to food and
00:19:20.779 --> 00:19:23.559
two of those women are by far and away some of
00:19:23.559 --> 00:19:24.920
the most interesting people in that cemetery
00:19:24.920 --> 00:19:28.690
from an isotopic point of view, grade 14 and
00:19:28.690 --> 00:19:31.809
grade 43 are super, super interesting. And they
00:19:31.809 --> 00:19:35.109
have this thing called wet feet, which is essentially
00:19:35.109 --> 00:19:37.210
at periods of their life on those fine grain
00:19:37.210 --> 00:19:39.529
little slices that Robin was talking about that
00:19:39.529 --> 00:19:42.849
we do, they get very, very wet. Wetter than I've
00:19:42.849 --> 00:19:46.730
ever seen out of thousands of samples like this.
00:19:46.890 --> 00:19:49.390
Those two women in particular, and one of them
00:19:49.390 --> 00:19:51.430
is exquisitely specific. She kind of moves from
00:19:52.299 --> 00:19:54.119
around about two and a half years of age, probably
00:19:54.119 --> 00:19:56.180
living somewhere near Alton to somewhere really,
00:19:56.299 --> 00:20:00.079
really wet, Fenlands, wetlands, basically only
00:20:00.079 --> 00:20:03.140
capable as far as where around Peterborough in
00:20:03.140 --> 00:20:04.440
the Fenlands, if anyone kind of knows, north
00:20:04.440 --> 00:20:06.640
of Cambridge, heading up towards the North Sea
00:20:06.640 --> 00:20:08.500
and the Wash. And she's a really interesting
00:20:08.500 --> 00:20:11.200
person, but I'll kind of hand over to Robin for
00:20:11.200 --> 00:20:14.980
some of that. And she has, her brooches actually
00:20:14.980 --> 00:20:18.269
come from... that area of the Fenlands too. So
00:20:18.269 --> 00:20:21.049
it's interesting. So one of the things that we
00:20:21.049 --> 00:20:26.869
can see with these women is that the women that
00:20:26.869 --> 00:20:28.950
we looked at go through two periods of stress,
00:20:29.109 --> 00:20:31.690
not one. So that's an interesting gender difference.
00:20:31.970 --> 00:20:34.970
And it could be linked to puberty. It could be
00:20:34.970 --> 00:20:39.170
linked to migration. So boys are fostered out,
00:20:39.210 --> 00:20:41.769
we think, at some age that they might be moving
00:20:41.769 --> 00:20:45.769
household. The women are... Are they being married
00:20:45.769 --> 00:20:48.009
off? Are they being trafficked? We don't exactly
00:20:48.009 --> 00:20:50.670
know what's happening, but they're also moving
00:20:50.670 --> 00:20:55.589
at 12 or 13 or 14. And so the kind of fine -grainedness
00:20:55.589 --> 00:20:59.150
of the story that the isotopes tell allow us
00:20:59.150 --> 00:21:02.470
to see life cycle in ways that we can't see from
00:21:02.470 --> 00:21:05.869
the written sources. One of the cool things about
00:21:05.869 --> 00:21:08.509
these Speculum Spotlight episodes is that we
00:21:08.509 --> 00:21:11.049
get to peek behind the curtain and learn about
00:21:11.049 --> 00:21:13.369
the stuff that doesn't make it into the article.
00:21:14.759 --> 00:21:16.960
How did this interdisciplinary collaboration
00:21:16.960 --> 00:21:20.680
come about? Well, I gave a paper on Zoom. I think
00:21:20.680 --> 00:21:23.039
it was Reading, was it? Reading Archaeology Department.
00:21:23.319 --> 00:21:25.420
And Sam was in the audience. And I said something
00:21:25.420 --> 00:21:27.599
about, it was a paper that I was giving on pottery.
00:21:27.759 --> 00:21:29.519
And I said something about pottery that interested
00:21:29.519 --> 00:21:32.440
her because it has the potential of impacting
00:21:32.440 --> 00:21:36.160
people's oxygen isotopes. So she said, we need
00:21:36.160 --> 00:21:39.259
to talk. And so we talked and we said, let's
00:21:39.259 --> 00:21:41.680
collaborate. That's how it happened. Although
00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:45.519
Sam is known as an Uber collaborator. She's not
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:47.799
monogamous at all. She's collaborating as far
00:21:47.799 --> 00:21:49.720
as I can tell with everybody. Yeah, I mean, I
00:21:49.720 --> 00:21:52.420
just get very excited by other people's papers
00:21:52.420 --> 00:21:56.039
and data. Exactly. And yeah, I mean, that paper
00:21:56.039 --> 00:21:58.140
that Robin was given just made me went, oh, OK,
00:21:58.359 --> 00:22:00.019
we need to tackle this. Do you know any particular
00:22:00.019 --> 00:22:02.759
sites that would be good? Because most of my
00:22:02.759 --> 00:22:06.000
previous work had been on much later. periods
00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:07.880
for the most part, kind of the 7th century, the
00:22:07.880 --> 00:22:10.160
conversion period. And I was interested in looking
00:22:10.160 --> 00:22:12.759
earlier and looking at what was happening. And
00:22:12.759 --> 00:22:15.819
she went, oh, this one, these pots, let's start
00:22:15.819 --> 00:22:18.079
here. And I think, I mean, one of the things
00:22:18.079 --> 00:22:21.299
that we've decided over time is we're just going
00:22:21.299 --> 00:22:23.339
to do everything on this cemetery. We're going
00:22:23.339 --> 00:22:26.220
to... Isotope everything. We've radiocarbon dated
00:22:26.220 --> 00:22:29.240
everything. Sam is about to do the peptides on
00:22:29.240 --> 00:22:31.480
teeth, which will allow us to do a quick and
00:22:31.480 --> 00:22:35.119
dirty sexing of skeletons, which is much, much
00:22:35.119 --> 00:22:39.279
cheaper than ADNA, can I just say? And we want
00:22:39.279 --> 00:22:41.440
to do lipids on pots. We want to do everything
00:22:41.440 --> 00:22:44.859
you can do, not just on the select. What happens
00:22:44.859 --> 00:22:47.920
oftentimes in cemeteries is that the six people
00:22:47.920 --> 00:22:52.220
with the nicest jewelry get all the tests. One
00:22:52.220 --> 00:22:54.059
of the groups that really interests me are the
00:22:54.059 --> 00:22:57.700
people without any grave goods at all or children
00:22:57.700 --> 00:22:59.940
who tend to not. It's very hard to figure out
00:22:59.940 --> 00:23:02.819
who they are and what they are. And so by doing
00:23:02.819 --> 00:23:04.960
everybody, we're going to have a look at this
00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:07.579
community that I think hasn't been done for any
00:23:07.579 --> 00:23:10.799
other community. No, not to this level, I don't
00:23:10.799 --> 00:23:13.019
think. Yeah. I've been putting together all the
00:23:13.019 --> 00:23:16.779
radiocarbon dates that we have. And what our
00:23:16.779 --> 00:23:18.859
radiocarbon dating shows is that the cemetery
00:23:18.859 --> 00:23:22.359
began earlier and... ended more quickly than
00:23:22.359 --> 00:23:25.180
the original author of the excavation report
00:23:25.180 --> 00:23:28.559
thought. Is this life -changing? Well, for those
00:23:28.559 --> 00:23:30.339
people it is, because we're now actually putting
00:23:30.339 --> 00:23:34.240
them in their proper chronological context, right?
00:23:34.319 --> 00:23:36.819
We're not thinking about them in the wrong decades
00:23:36.819 --> 00:23:38.579
or wrong centuries, but we're thinking about
00:23:38.579 --> 00:23:41.359
them right where they should be. I think this
00:23:41.359 --> 00:23:43.500
project makes a strong case for the importance
00:23:43.500 --> 00:23:46.319
of cross -disciplinary collaboration for medievalists.
00:23:46.880 --> 00:23:49.440
Right. And I'm sure we have different motives
00:23:49.440 --> 00:23:52.180
for this. One of my motives is I want historians
00:23:52.180 --> 00:23:54.980
to pay attention to the scientific findings.
00:23:55.339 --> 00:23:57.220
And they're not going to pay attention to the
00:23:57.220 --> 00:23:59.359
scientific findings if they're only written by
00:23:59.359 --> 00:24:01.819
scientists publishing in scientific archaeological
00:24:01.819 --> 00:24:04.259
journals, right? It was really important for
00:24:04.259 --> 00:24:07.839
me to write about stuff like this in collaboration
00:24:07.839 --> 00:24:11.559
because I wouldn't have a clue how to drill a
00:24:11.559 --> 00:24:14.119
hole in a tooth, right? It's not what I do. but
00:24:14.119 --> 00:24:16.220
I can write about it and I can put it in context
00:24:16.220 --> 00:24:19.480
in a way that historians and lit people might
00:24:19.480 --> 00:24:21.960
actually pay attention to. So for me, that's
00:24:21.960 --> 00:24:25.660
a really important thing. Yeah, and I mean, from
00:24:25.660 --> 00:24:30.079
my perspective as well, I think the best, I guess
00:24:30.079 --> 00:24:33.359
the best service you can do to these people is
00:24:33.359 --> 00:24:35.619
to collaborate with a historian to put them back
00:24:35.619 --> 00:24:37.819
in that context. And I found that from some of
00:24:37.819 --> 00:24:40.339
my previous work. It makes it better and it makes
00:24:40.339 --> 00:24:42.559
the stories more engaging. Otherwise, yeah, you're
00:24:42.559 --> 00:24:44.599
just kind of talking about graphs and like this
00:24:44.599 --> 00:24:47.500
one person is a dot over here. You know, there's
00:24:47.500 --> 00:24:50.960
it's fine. There's a place for that sort of stuff.
00:24:51.079 --> 00:24:53.059
But I think the methods are at a point now where
00:24:53.059 --> 00:24:56.059
it's pretty par for the course in bioarchaeology.
00:24:56.059 --> 00:24:59.279
And some of those papers are relatively dry and
00:24:59.279 --> 00:25:01.720
boring. And what we really need to be doing to
00:25:01.720 --> 00:25:04.420
push all of this forward is to collaborate to
00:25:04.420 --> 00:25:07.369
really get back to that. individual and that
00:25:07.369 --> 00:25:09.750
body and that life course centered approach rather
00:25:09.750 --> 00:25:11.750
than just thinking about it all as data clouds
00:25:11.750 --> 00:25:15.230
in a very vague way and if you think about the
00:25:15.230 --> 00:25:17.769
way that excavation reports of cemeteries are
00:25:17.769 --> 00:25:19.529
written they're often written in the aggregate
00:25:19.529 --> 00:25:22.829
so you end up getting a description of a cemetery
00:25:22.829 --> 00:25:25.609
that it's got 200 years worth of evidence but
00:25:25.609 --> 00:25:27.809
somehow it's all kind of mushed together and
00:25:27.809 --> 00:25:29.730
what it describes is a time and place that never
00:25:29.730 --> 00:25:34.119
existed because People in 425 and people in 625
00:25:34.119 --> 00:25:35.940
are living in really, really different universes.
00:25:36.380 --> 00:25:40.140
So imagine reading one of these reports instead
00:25:40.140 --> 00:25:42.819
where every individual, instead of just getting
00:25:42.819 --> 00:25:45.740
their grave goods listed, every individual has
00:25:45.740 --> 00:25:48.619
a little biography and you put them in chronological
00:25:48.619 --> 00:25:51.759
order and then you make some sense out of both
00:25:51.759 --> 00:25:53.460
the individuals and the community in which they
00:25:53.460 --> 00:25:55.059
lived. I mean, it would be a different way of
00:25:55.059 --> 00:25:59.940
writing this material. Yes, you are literally
00:25:59.940 --> 00:26:04.240
humanizing these individuals. So before we leave,
00:26:04.339 --> 00:26:07.019
what's next for the project? Well, Sam's busy
00:26:07.019 --> 00:26:10.380
right now with a team of master students and
00:26:10.380 --> 00:26:15.200
postdocs. Exactly. Yeah, we've got a small army
00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:17.839
in the lab at the minute. So like Robin said,
00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:21.940
trying to do some peptide sexing to work out.
00:26:22.299 --> 00:26:23.980
particularly for the kids. They're very hard
00:26:23.980 --> 00:26:26.119
to look at their bones and use osteologists.
00:26:26.160 --> 00:26:29.160
You kind of can't work out what sex of skeleton
00:26:29.160 --> 00:26:31.880
is before puberty. So that will be really interesting.
00:26:32.740 --> 00:26:35.779
Right. And again, what people did in the past
00:26:35.779 --> 00:26:38.519
was use grave goods, right? But that's putting
00:26:38.519 --> 00:26:41.440
somebody's gender expectations on these bodies.
00:26:42.910 --> 00:26:44.910
exactly it's better not to do that so yeah we're
00:26:44.910 --> 00:26:46.930
hoping to like disentangle all of those things
00:26:46.930 --> 00:26:49.309
as well which will be really fantastic and we're
00:26:49.309 --> 00:26:51.990
doing a lot of work on the cremations so that's
00:26:51.990 --> 00:26:53.349
something that kind of didn't make it into this
00:26:53.349 --> 00:26:55.990
paper but we're hoping to kind of bring that
00:26:55.990 --> 00:26:58.190
out so again we can't sort of work out what they're
00:26:58.190 --> 00:27:00.029
eating because when they get burnt all of that
00:27:00.029 --> 00:27:02.230
nice collagen goes goes bye -bye but we're doing
00:27:02.230 --> 00:27:04.490
radiocarbon dating and some other isotopes to
00:27:04.490 --> 00:27:06.490
work out if these people were any more mobile
00:27:06.490 --> 00:27:08.990
than the people who were buried full body with
00:27:08.990 --> 00:27:12.329
stuff and then hopefully also doing residues
00:27:12.329 --> 00:27:15.109
on on the pots both from the cremations and ones
00:27:15.109 --> 00:27:17.210
in with the inhumations to work out what was
00:27:17.210 --> 00:27:19.069
cooked in there and if some of these funerary
00:27:19.069 --> 00:27:21.670
urns adjust for the funeral or if it was you
00:27:21.670 --> 00:27:24.349
know you bury grandma in her favorite um cooking
00:27:24.349 --> 00:27:29.970
pot or yeah yeah bury me in my dutch oven yeah
00:27:36.359 --> 00:27:39.319
Well, Sam, Robin, thank you for joining us today
00:27:39.319 --> 00:27:41.599
to discuss your article. Well, thanks for doing
00:27:41.599 --> 00:27:43.960
it. We're always happy to talk about our work.
00:27:44.119 --> 00:27:46.819
Thanks so much. It's been great. Many thanks
00:27:46.819 --> 00:27:49.359
to John, Robin, and Sam for this fascinating
00:27:49.359 --> 00:27:53.539
conversation. You can read their article, Rethinking
00:27:53.539 --> 00:27:56.539
Grand Narratives, Mobility, Diet, and Health
00:27:56.539 --> 00:27:58.880
in a Small Corner of Early Medieval Hampshire,
00:27:59.259 --> 00:28:02.599
free of charge on the Speculum website at the
00:28:02.599 --> 00:28:06.390
University of Chicago Press. Let me also thank
00:28:06.390 --> 00:28:09.730
the Multicultural Middle Ages team, Will Beattie,
00:28:09.849 --> 00:28:13.730
Lauren Lee, Rita Mara, Logan Quigley, and Jonathan
00:28:13.730 --> 00:28:17.369
Correa -Reyes. In addition, I want to thank the
00:28:17.369 --> 00:28:20.849
Speculum Editorial Board, staff members Taylor
00:28:20.849 --> 00:28:24.569
McCall, Carol Anderson, and Esther German, the
00:28:24.569 --> 00:28:27.650
Graduate Committee of the MAA, and the Medieval
00:28:27.650 --> 00:28:30.869
Academy itself for co -sponsoring this podcast.
00:28:31.369 --> 00:28:34.900
Music for the MMA is by Anna O 'Connell. I'm
00:28:34.900 --> 00:28:37.660
Barbara Newman, editor of Speculum, the journal
00:28:37.660 --> 00:28:40.339
of the Medieval Academy of America, published
00:28:40.339 --> 00:28:44.079
by the University of Chicago Press. If you join
00:28:44.079 --> 00:28:46.900
the Medieval Academy, you will receive a subscription
00:28:46.900 --> 00:28:51.220
to both print and digital editions. Online, you
00:28:51.220 --> 00:28:55.740
can find us at journals .uchicago .edu. We'll
00:28:55.740 --> 00:28:59.759
be back in October with the next episode of Speculum
00:28:59.759 --> 00:29:00.359
Spotlight.
00:00:07.719 --> 00:00:11.300
Hi there. I'm Barbara Newman, the new editor
00:00:11.300 --> 00:00:15.460
of Speculum, a journal of medieval studies. Welcome
00:00:15.460 --> 00:00:18.739
to Speculum Spotlight, our quarterly podcast
00:00:18.739 --> 00:00:21.579
in collaboration with the Multicultural Middle
00:00:21.579 --> 00:00:25.699
Ages. Each episode is designed to bring you behind
00:00:25.699 --> 00:00:28.699
the scenes of an article in our current issue.
00:00:29.140 --> 00:00:32.380
This month's episode deals with the Medieval
00:00:32.380 --> 00:00:36.000
Academy's 2025 presidential address by Robin
00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:40.039
Fleming. It's also a sequel to our April conversation
00:00:40.039 --> 00:00:43.500
about burial archaeology in the early Middle
00:00:43.500 --> 00:00:48.159
Ages. Co -authors Robin Fleming, Sam Leggett,
00:00:48.159 --> 00:00:51.719
and Emma Smith have investigated an early 5th
00:00:51.719 --> 00:00:55.320
century cemetery in the English village of Alton
00:00:55.320 --> 00:00:57.740
on the edge of the South Downs in Hampshire.
00:00:58.060 --> 00:01:01.979
Using bioarchaeological evidence from bones and
00:01:01.979 --> 00:01:05.579
teeth, They're able to obtain remarkably precise
00:01:05.579 --> 00:01:09.519
findings about the diet of individuals buried
00:01:09.519 --> 00:01:12.900
at Alton, their state of health, and even the
00:01:12.900 --> 00:01:16.659
ages at which they migrated from wetland ecosystems
00:01:16.659 --> 00:01:21.560
to the drier territory of the South Downs. Despite
00:01:21.560 --> 00:01:24.599
the complete absence of texts from this period,
00:01:25.129 --> 00:01:28.049
An analysis of the Alton skeletons and grave
00:01:28.049 --> 00:01:31.930
goods enables us to challenge older grand narratives
00:01:31.930 --> 00:01:35.909
about barbarian invasions and the fall of the
00:01:35.909 --> 00:01:39.730
Roman Empire. Instead of military incursions
00:01:39.730 --> 00:01:43.629
or dramatic cultural change, the cemetery instead
00:01:43.629 --> 00:01:47.609
tells a tale of individual migration, shifts
00:01:47.609 --> 00:01:51.329
in the agricultural regime, and consequent food
00:01:51.329 --> 00:01:55.310
insecurity. with a sad preponderance of youthful
00:01:55.310 --> 00:01:59.790
deaths. The host and producer of this episode
00:01:59.790 --> 00:02:03.010
is Jonathan Correa Reyes, an assistant professor
00:02:03.010 --> 00:02:07.510
of English at Clemson University. John interviews
00:02:07.510 --> 00:02:11.169
two of the three co -authors. Robin Fleming,
00:02:11.330 --> 00:02:14.229
past president of the Medieval Academy of America,
00:02:14.569 --> 00:02:17.569
is a professor of history at Boston College.
00:02:18.169 --> 00:02:21.129
A former MacArthur fellow, she has published
00:02:21.129 --> 00:02:24.490
several books on early medieval England, including,
00:02:24.669 --> 00:02:28.750
most recently, The Material Fall of Roman Britain,
00:02:28.930 --> 00:02:36.069
300 -525 CE. Dr. Sam Leggett is a lecturer in
00:02:36.069 --> 00:02:39.669
computational archaeology at the University of
00:02:39.669 --> 00:02:43.650
Edinburgh. She uses osteological and funerary
00:02:43.650 --> 00:02:47.509
evidence to investigate diet and mobility across
00:02:47.509 --> 00:02:51.270
Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. With
00:02:51.270 --> 00:02:54.729
her co -author Emma Smith, Robin and Sam have
00:02:54.729 --> 00:02:58.729
written Rethinking Grand Narratives, Mobility,
00:02:58.830 --> 00:03:02.629
Diet, and Health in a Small Corner of Early Medieval
00:03:02.629 --> 00:03:06.030
Hampshire. You can read this article in the July
00:03:06.030 --> 00:03:10.939
2025 issue of Speculum. For now, let's listen
00:03:10.939 --> 00:03:17.479
to their conversation. Welcome, Robin. Welcome,
00:03:17.620 --> 00:03:20.919
Sam. It's great to have you with us. In this
00:03:20.919 --> 00:03:23.379
piece, you discuss three grand narratives about
00:03:23.379 --> 00:03:26.080
early medieval England that need to be reconsidered.
00:03:26.259 --> 00:03:29.400
So, to get us started, what is a grand narrative?
00:03:30.079 --> 00:03:32.419
So I think as the historian, I think I'll take
00:03:32.419 --> 00:03:34.479
that question. And I think Sam will be happy
00:03:34.479 --> 00:03:36.520
that I take that question. The grand narratives
00:03:36.520 --> 00:03:39.340
are very useful, right? We can't do without them
00:03:39.340 --> 00:03:41.620
in history, particularly those of us who teach,
00:03:41.759 --> 00:03:44.800
because you need a kind of big story to tell
00:03:44.800 --> 00:03:46.979
over the course of the semester or a year. Or
00:03:46.979 --> 00:03:48.860
for those of us who write books, you need a big
00:03:48.860 --> 00:03:51.879
story to tell across the trajectory of a book.
00:03:52.509 --> 00:03:55.610
So I'm not opposed to grand narratives, but I
00:03:55.610 --> 00:03:57.310
think there are a lot of grand narratives that
00:03:57.310 --> 00:04:00.550
we tell that don't necessarily match the evidence
00:04:00.550 --> 00:04:03.330
that we now have. We have new kinds of evidence
00:04:03.330 --> 00:04:06.469
coming to the fore that suggest to us that grand
00:04:06.469 --> 00:04:10.129
narratives that we depend on, which are written
00:04:10.129 --> 00:04:14.310
based on written evidence, are not correct. And
00:04:14.310 --> 00:04:18.069
so the big stories of the political fall of Rome.
00:04:18.759 --> 00:04:22.779
or the barbarian invasions, so -called, are two
00:04:22.779 --> 00:04:25.459
of the grand narratives that we tell a lot in
00:04:25.459 --> 00:04:28.459
the classes that we teach. But I think that Sam
00:04:28.459 --> 00:04:30.240
and my work, along with other people's work,
00:04:30.259 --> 00:04:33.180
has shown that those two narratives really need
00:04:33.180 --> 00:04:35.740
to be thought about harder to understand what
00:04:35.740 --> 00:04:40.920
it was like to live in the period. Thank you,
00:04:40.920 --> 00:04:43.240
Robin. As you mentioned, these grand narratives
00:04:43.240 --> 00:04:46.379
are useful analytical tools for us as we think
00:04:46.379 --> 00:04:49.160
about and guide students through thinking about
00:04:49.160 --> 00:04:52.459
periods in the past. As a follow -up question,
00:04:52.699 --> 00:04:56.019
what are the stakes of allowing these narratives
00:04:56.019 --> 00:04:59.560
to go unchallenged, especially when, as your
00:04:59.560 --> 00:05:01.899
article shows, for example, the archaeological
00:05:01.899 --> 00:05:07.019
record tells a different story? Big problems
00:05:07.019 --> 00:05:09.839
is a lot of our grand narratives are relics of
00:05:09.839 --> 00:05:13.040
histories past. And a lot of the stories we tell
00:05:13.040 --> 00:05:15.079
are the same stories that were being told in
00:05:15.079 --> 00:05:18.120
the 19th century, right? And so in particular,
00:05:18.139 --> 00:05:21.540
British history was told from the vantage point
00:05:21.540 --> 00:05:25.040
of imperial history, colonial history. There
00:05:25.040 --> 00:05:27.519
was a kind of racialist view. in these histories.
00:05:27.720 --> 00:05:32.220
And the Anglo -Saxons, the early people settled
00:05:32.220 --> 00:05:34.800
in England, are implicated in these racialist
00:05:34.800 --> 00:05:37.420
narratives. And so if we don't think hard about
00:05:37.420 --> 00:05:39.939
why we tell the stories that we tell, and we
00:05:39.939 --> 00:05:41.759
don't think about the history of the histories
00:05:41.759 --> 00:05:44.500
that we tell, we end up getting trapped in older
00:05:44.500 --> 00:05:48.879
narratives that perpetuate older sort of racist,
00:05:48.939 --> 00:05:51.600
imperialist narratives that I think we don't
00:05:51.600 --> 00:05:54.899
believe anymore. In a way, this nostalgic imperialism
00:05:54.899 --> 00:05:57.079
you point towards has been making a comeback
00:05:57.079 --> 00:05:59.920
in recent decades. I'm thinking, for example,
00:05:59.920 --> 00:06:03.040
of appeals to the Anglo -Saxons as the foundation
00:06:03.040 --> 00:06:06.379
of British and even American identity. And one
00:06:06.379 --> 00:06:08.720
of the strange things about British history is
00:06:08.720 --> 00:06:11.740
British history begins in the early 5th century.
00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:14.100
It doesn't begin in the Roman period, even though
00:06:14.100 --> 00:06:16.019
the Roman period is a period that generates a
00:06:16.019 --> 00:06:20.000
lot of written sources. English history begins
00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:23.379
with the Anglo -Saxons, and that's a relic of
00:06:23.379 --> 00:06:26.639
19th century imperialist and racialist ideologies,
00:06:26.819 --> 00:06:28.939
right? We just ignore Rome because we don't want
00:06:28.939 --> 00:06:31.399
to be anybody else's empire. We want to be in
00:06:31.399 --> 00:06:33.759
charge of things ourselves. To turn more specifically
00:06:33.759 --> 00:06:36.600
to your study, you are working in Alton Cemetery.
00:06:36.879 --> 00:06:39.519
Could you contextualize this cemetery for us?
00:06:40.029 --> 00:06:44.050
Sure. So if we look at the evidence that we have
00:06:44.050 --> 00:06:47.449
now that we didn't have 30 years ago, much of
00:06:47.449 --> 00:06:50.449
that evidence provided by either new excavations
00:06:50.449 --> 00:06:53.430
or by the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which
00:06:53.430 --> 00:06:58.670
is a program that has allowed us to capture a
00:06:58.670 --> 00:07:01.490
lot of the evidence that is found by amateur
00:07:01.490 --> 00:07:04.949
metal detectors. So if we look at that evidence,
00:07:05.189 --> 00:07:08.029
what we can see is that there's a period in the
00:07:08.029 --> 00:07:10.529
5th century when our cemetery was founded in
00:07:10.529 --> 00:07:13.790
which there are both new people coming in from
00:07:13.790 --> 00:07:16.449
the continent and lots of lots of people who
00:07:16.449 --> 00:07:19.149
are related to the old Romano -British population.
00:07:19.629 --> 00:07:24.069
And so it's within this context of both natives
00:07:24.069 --> 00:07:27.709
and newcomers that our cemetery is founded. As
00:07:27.709 --> 00:07:30.089
I was reading your piece, what was interesting,
00:07:30.209 --> 00:07:32.709
at least for me, was the focus on individual
00:07:32.709 --> 00:07:35.889
histories. One way to destabilize these grand
00:07:35.889 --> 00:07:38.889
narratives is to turn from the macro to the micro.
00:07:39.170 --> 00:07:41.790
You speak a lot about the agency of the people
00:07:41.790 --> 00:07:44.629
buried at Alton, and how much of their individual
00:07:44.629 --> 00:07:47.529
histories we can rebuild using the archaeological
00:07:47.529 --> 00:07:52.209
record. Can you talk to us a bit about the importance
00:07:52.209 --> 00:07:55.009
or some of the tensions of extrapolating these
00:07:55.009 --> 00:07:58.490
macro and micro histories? So I'm going to start
00:07:58.490 --> 00:08:01.129
and then I'm going to let Sam finish this. And
00:08:01.129 --> 00:08:03.370
so for me, I would say if you think back to the
00:08:03.370 --> 00:08:06.250
grand narratives and you think about the way
00:08:06.250 --> 00:08:08.949
one of the grand narratives about. barbarian
00:08:08.949 --> 00:08:11.870
migrations is oftentimes this notion that there
00:08:11.870 --> 00:08:15.230
are these big war bands on the move, and somehow
00:08:15.230 --> 00:08:17.889
it's an event rather than something that happens
00:08:17.889 --> 00:08:19.370
over the course of a couple of hundred years.
00:08:20.170 --> 00:08:22.889
You miss the individuals who are part of whatever
00:08:22.889 --> 00:08:25.410
it is that is going on. And so if you look at
00:08:25.410 --> 00:08:28.350
individuals, and we can tell through new scientific
00:08:28.350 --> 00:08:30.930
methods whether individuals are moving or not,
00:08:31.069 --> 00:08:33.350
we have a quite different story. And Sam can
00:08:33.350 --> 00:08:36.330
speak to what we can tell about migration in
00:08:36.330 --> 00:08:38.519
this period. if we look at individuals rather
00:08:38.519 --> 00:08:41.399
than the aggregate. Yeah, no, exactly. So in
00:08:41.399 --> 00:08:44.759
bioarchaeology, it tends to be dominated by the
00:08:44.759 --> 00:08:47.200
ancient DNA people. And they often call themselves
00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:49.679
like pop gen, so population genetics. And they
00:08:49.679 --> 00:08:51.600
like to look at the really, really big level.
00:08:51.740 --> 00:08:53.460
And by looking at DNA, you're really looking
00:08:53.460 --> 00:08:55.940
at sort of the aggregation of people's entire
00:08:55.940 --> 00:08:58.659
sort of, you know, family tree history. And so
00:08:58.659 --> 00:09:00.899
I think that often distorts what we're talking
00:09:00.899 --> 00:09:03.259
about in this period. And I've got a lot of beef
00:09:03.259 --> 00:09:05.960
with how they tend to frame these narratives.
00:09:06.159 --> 00:09:09.279
And as a stable isotope person, what I like to
00:09:09.279 --> 00:09:11.679
look at is those individual narratives. And if
00:09:12.159 --> 00:09:14.659
individual people within specific cemeteries
00:09:14.659 --> 00:09:17.519
move during their lifetimes or not whereas these
00:09:17.519 --> 00:09:20.720
larger narratives both historically and in terms
00:09:20.720 --> 00:09:23.399
of DNA tend to talk about you know huge migrations
00:09:23.399 --> 00:09:26.080
and big arrows on maps but we can go okay no
00:09:26.080 --> 00:09:28.600
this lady buried with these particular brooches
00:09:28.600 --> 00:09:32.480
moved once twice three times in her life and
00:09:32.480 --> 00:09:34.179
now we're getting to the resolution where you
00:09:34.179 --> 00:09:36.279
can say All right, actually, at the age of two,
00:09:36.360 --> 00:09:38.220
she was born near the site. At the age of, say,
00:09:38.240 --> 00:09:39.899
seven or eight, she moved away. She moved to
00:09:39.899 --> 00:09:42.100
somewhere that looked a bit like this. And then
00:09:42.100 --> 00:09:44.779
by the time she died and was buried back at Alton,
00:09:44.940 --> 00:09:47.759
you know, she'd sort of moved back again. So
00:09:47.759 --> 00:09:50.759
we can get these really fine -grained life histories
00:09:50.759 --> 00:09:52.720
that I think are so much more interesting than
00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:55.000
just saying X, Y, Z percentage of people were
00:09:55.000 --> 00:09:58.700
local or non -local. You get that real embodied
00:09:58.700 --> 00:10:01.700
experience of the past that is so hard to get
00:10:01.700 --> 00:10:04.820
out in any other way, really. If you look at
00:10:04.820 --> 00:10:07.899
whole cemetery populations, what you can see
00:10:07.899 --> 00:10:10.240
is you can see different people moving at different
00:10:10.240 --> 00:10:12.539
times. And that's not the grand narrative. The
00:10:12.539 --> 00:10:14.340
grand narrative is, I don't know, everybody's
00:10:14.340 --> 00:10:17.059
moving at the same time, right? But what we found
00:10:17.059 --> 00:10:20.059
is that people over generations are moving into
00:10:20.059 --> 00:10:22.690
the settlement. What we're finding is lots of
00:10:22.690 --> 00:10:24.769
women and children are moving in this period.
00:10:24.809 --> 00:10:26.629
That's really not part of the grand narrative.
00:10:26.909 --> 00:10:30.049
And so what we begin to see is a lot of individual
00:10:30.049 --> 00:10:32.429
movement rather than a lot of mass movement.
00:10:32.529 --> 00:10:36.009
And that's a really different story. You mentioned
00:10:36.009 --> 00:10:38.990
Bruges, Sam. What other types of objects have
00:10:38.990 --> 00:10:41.470
you found buried in the graves of Alton Cemetery?
00:10:41.980 --> 00:10:44.179
Yeah, I mean, well, Alton's great because it
00:10:44.179 --> 00:10:47.080
kind of straddles the material culture from the
00:10:47.080 --> 00:10:49.620
late Roman period through to what we often call
00:10:49.620 --> 00:10:52.059
Anglo -Saxon or early medieval, whereas a lot
00:10:52.059 --> 00:10:53.600
of other sites that I've worked on are quite
00:10:53.600 --> 00:10:56.519
definitively or often talked in, again, these
00:10:56.519 --> 00:10:59.399
sort of very clear definitions of this as a new
00:10:59.399 --> 00:11:01.860
material culture. So there's various different
00:11:01.860 --> 00:11:03.740
types of brooch types, and I'll let Robin sort
00:11:03.740 --> 00:11:05.700
of tell you more about that because there's some...
00:11:05.919 --> 00:11:08.840
very interesting sort of subtypes there. We've
00:11:08.840 --> 00:11:11.320
got pottery, weapons, you've really kind of got
00:11:11.320 --> 00:11:15.019
the whole gamut of things that kind of span the
00:11:15.019 --> 00:11:16.720
third, fourth centuries through to the seventh.
00:11:18.489 --> 00:11:21.429
And there's also one of the nice things about
00:11:21.429 --> 00:11:23.409
this cemetery, like a lot of early cemeteries,
00:11:23.429 --> 00:11:26.309
is it's both an inhumation cemetery, so people
00:11:26.309 --> 00:11:28.610
were burying bodies, but it's also a cremation
00:11:28.610 --> 00:11:30.870
cemetery as well. So there's lots of interesting
00:11:30.870 --> 00:11:34.149
pots with the remains of people inside and probably
00:11:34.149 --> 00:11:37.720
animals as well. That hasn't been tested yet.
00:11:38.039 --> 00:11:42.120
So there is a really interesting variety of grave
00:11:42.120 --> 00:11:45.659
goods. And just as an aside, so I'm going to
00:11:45.659 --> 00:11:48.259
be working on this material in a couple of weeks
00:11:48.259 --> 00:11:51.379
in Winchester. And when I was talking to the
00:11:51.379 --> 00:11:54.139
person who's in charge of the stores at Winchester,
00:11:54.240 --> 00:11:56.240
he was very afraid that he would have to take
00:11:56.240 --> 00:11:59.120
a lot of stuff out of the glass cases in the
00:11:59.120 --> 00:12:01.600
museum where people can look at this stuff. But
00:12:01.600 --> 00:12:03.519
the only stuff in the glass cases is the stuff
00:12:03.519 --> 00:12:05.559
that has to do with warfare and men. And there's
00:12:05.559 --> 00:12:08.259
not a single object that has to do with women
00:12:08.259 --> 00:12:11.779
or children. So, which is back to the grand narrative,
00:12:11.899 --> 00:12:14.299
right? I mean, you want your display of Anglo
00:12:14.299 --> 00:12:16.600
-Saxons to be about guys with swords and you
00:12:16.600 --> 00:12:18.759
don't want them to be about other things. So
00:12:18.759 --> 00:12:21.259
I thought that was actually kind of amusing.
00:12:21.740 --> 00:12:24.779
That is not surprising. To focus on the human
00:12:24.779 --> 00:12:27.039
remains for a minute. Sam, you've been talking
00:12:27.039 --> 00:12:29.840
about the kinds of information that can be extracted
00:12:29.840 --> 00:12:32.879
from these bodies. Could you talk to us about
00:12:32.879 --> 00:12:36.259
your process and methods? I'm particularly curious
00:12:36.259 --> 00:12:39.259
about diets and how you access this kind of information.
00:12:39.500 --> 00:12:42.519
And please keep it simple so I can follow along.
00:12:42.980 --> 00:12:45.159
Yeah, no, really good question. And I'll try
00:12:45.159 --> 00:12:47.919
to keep it all nice and family friendly and not
00:12:47.919 --> 00:12:51.440
get too into the chemistry. Essentially, isotopes
00:12:51.440 --> 00:12:54.039
are forms of chemical elements and they've just
00:12:54.039 --> 00:12:55.759
got slightly different molecular weights, which
00:12:55.759 --> 00:12:58.460
means that nerds like me can then measure that.
00:12:58.500 --> 00:12:59.899
You can measure the weights of them when they
00:12:59.899 --> 00:13:01.259
come out, but you don't need to worry too much
00:13:01.259 --> 00:13:03.179
about that. Most people will be kind of familiar
00:13:03.179 --> 00:13:05.480
with the fact that we're carbon -based life forms.
00:13:05.700 --> 00:13:07.919
And so carbon is one of the chemical elements
00:13:07.919 --> 00:13:10.340
we like to hone in on archaeological science
00:13:10.340 --> 00:13:12.399
because, number one, it allows for radiocarbon
00:13:12.399 --> 00:13:15.659
dating. Fantastic. That's great. And also carbon.
00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:18.799
12 and 13 really kind of root us in the landscape.
00:13:18.919 --> 00:13:20.399
And so it's a really useful thing for looking
00:13:20.399 --> 00:13:22.840
at diet because it's linked to the bottom of
00:13:22.840 --> 00:13:24.279
the food chain, the plants that we're eating.
00:13:24.460 --> 00:13:26.820
And particularly for this period and Alton, it's
00:13:26.820 --> 00:13:29.519
really useful for us to tell apart some major
00:13:29.519 --> 00:13:31.840
dietary changes that can happen at the end of
00:13:31.840 --> 00:13:34.059
the Roman period in particular. And we can talk
00:13:34.059 --> 00:13:35.659
about, you know, the hows and the whys of that
00:13:35.659 --> 00:13:39.120
later. But carbon can tell you between particularly
00:13:39.120 --> 00:13:42.580
sort of marine diets and terrestrial, as well
00:13:42.580 --> 00:13:44.259
as if people are kind of eating different types
00:13:44.259 --> 00:13:47.029
of plants that are drought. resistant. And then
00:13:47.029 --> 00:13:48.850
your nitrogen is really linked back to where
00:13:48.850 --> 00:13:51.009
you are in the food chain. So you might read
00:13:51.009 --> 00:13:52.509
in the paper where we sort of talk about people
00:13:52.509 --> 00:13:54.169
having higher nitrogen, meaning they're eating
00:13:54.169 --> 00:13:56.649
more meat or sort of lower nitrogen values. And
00:13:56.649 --> 00:13:58.429
that means they're kind of closer to being modern
00:13:58.429 --> 00:14:01.370
day vegetarians or vegans. And the way we kind
00:14:01.370 --> 00:14:04.169
of get at that is you need relatively well preserved
00:14:04.169 --> 00:14:08.350
bones or teeth, and we want to extract out the
00:14:08.350 --> 00:14:12.139
collagen. So people probably... maybe even taking
00:14:12.139 --> 00:14:14.419
collagen supplements that's a whole other thing
00:14:14.419 --> 00:14:16.159
but you know we want that that's the thing that
00:14:16.159 --> 00:14:18.720
gives our skin and our bones the elasticity and
00:14:18.720 --> 00:14:20.360
sort of the bendiness and that's kind of the
00:14:20.360 --> 00:14:23.120
best bit to get out for for these type of results
00:14:23.120 --> 00:14:25.659
that you want so to do that we have to get rid
00:14:25.659 --> 00:14:27.139
of the mineral part of the bone that helps you
00:14:27.139 --> 00:14:28.899
stand up and is the bit that makes it strong
00:14:28.899 --> 00:14:32.139
so we dissolve the bones and or your tooth roots
00:14:32.139 --> 00:14:34.539
because that's also got collagen in it in weak
00:14:34.539 --> 00:14:38.259
acid to make it springy and squishy. So there's
00:14:38.259 --> 00:14:41.279
a lot of poking bones in acid for weeks on end
00:14:41.279 --> 00:14:43.000
until they're squishy enough because you want
00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:46.220
to do it really gently, right? These are 1500
00:14:46.220 --> 00:14:49.379
year old plus people. You don't want to do it
00:14:49.379 --> 00:14:51.360
too quickly and have it completely lost in the
00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:54.539
acid. And then essentially you go through a whole
00:14:54.539 --> 00:14:58.259
process to then turn that into human soup and
00:14:58.259 --> 00:14:59.960
then you freeze dry it and it looks like cotton
00:14:59.960 --> 00:15:02.440
candy. for an American audience. And that's in
00:15:02.440 --> 00:15:04.379
all of us. That's in your skin, that's in your
00:15:04.379 --> 00:15:06.940
bones. And that was what we can then look at
00:15:06.940 --> 00:15:09.340
and put through a mass spec for dietary information,
00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:11.559
in particular, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur,
00:15:11.779 --> 00:15:14.419
which is linked both to your diet, but also to
00:15:14.419 --> 00:15:16.379
mobility. And we talk a lot about the sulfur
00:15:16.379 --> 00:15:19.080
in terms of wet feet and where people are living.
00:15:19.379 --> 00:15:22.899
And then for mobility, usually apart from sulfur,
00:15:22.940 --> 00:15:24.879
which is a relatively new technique, we want
00:15:24.879 --> 00:15:27.659
to look at people's tooth enamel. So that enamel
00:15:27.659 --> 00:15:31.049
structure. locks in the drinking water signatures
00:15:31.049 --> 00:15:33.330
from the moments that those teeth were being
00:15:33.330 --> 00:15:35.639
formed. So everyone can probably remember when
00:15:35.639 --> 00:15:37.059
they were losing different teeth at different
00:15:37.059 --> 00:15:38.960
times of their life, right? Or when they come
00:15:38.960 --> 00:15:41.100
through, you know, anyone with kids is kind of
00:15:41.100 --> 00:15:44.220
imagining the horror of weaning and things, yeah.
00:15:44.340 --> 00:15:46.480
But that's really useful for us. Find resolution
00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:49.019
from dentistry when these teeth form and things.
00:15:49.100 --> 00:15:50.759
So we can target, you know, teeth to look at
00:15:50.759 --> 00:15:53.759
really, really early life. When somebody's, you
00:15:53.759 --> 00:15:56.419
know, have their third molars, their wisdom teeth
00:15:56.419 --> 00:15:58.019
coming through, that's kind of the latest snapshot
00:15:58.019 --> 00:16:01.450
we can get out of your teeth. And then... So
00:16:01.450 --> 00:16:04.149
I said the oxygen linked to the water and then
00:16:04.149 --> 00:16:05.730
strontium is linked to the bedrock that you're
00:16:05.730 --> 00:16:07.710
living on. You can kind of then imagine we can
00:16:07.710 --> 00:16:09.710
sort of add the layers of are they in sort of
00:16:09.710 --> 00:16:11.669
a warm climate and you're getting sort of heated
00:16:11.669 --> 00:16:13.870
water from living somewhere like the Mediterranean
00:16:13.870 --> 00:16:15.809
if you're a late Roman who's coming to Britain
00:16:15.809 --> 00:16:18.330
or if maybe they've come from somewhere wetter
00:16:18.330 --> 00:16:20.590
and colder, you know, like the upland areas in
00:16:20.590 --> 00:16:23.250
Wales or northern Britain or somewhere else in
00:16:23.250 --> 00:16:24.990
Europe. And so those are kind of what we can
00:16:24.990 --> 00:16:28.470
triangulate to then get a picture of where people
00:16:28.470 --> 00:16:30.690
are living, what they're eating. And that might
00:16:30.690 --> 00:16:33.450
give you hints as to what cultural background
00:16:33.450 --> 00:16:35.350
they come from if they're eating more marine
00:16:35.350 --> 00:16:37.350
stuff or terrestrial things. There's lots of
00:16:37.350 --> 00:16:38.970
nuance there, but hopefully that kind of gives
00:16:38.970 --> 00:16:43.149
you an idea. And one of the things that Sam does
00:16:43.149 --> 00:16:46.590
is the denting where she drills these incremental
00:16:46.590 --> 00:16:50.149
holes so she can basically see what a person
00:16:50.149 --> 00:16:52.549
is eating and where they're living every six
00:16:52.549 --> 00:16:54.669
months of life or every year of life for the
00:16:54.669 --> 00:16:57.649
first 18 years. So that's a level of resolution
00:16:57.649 --> 00:17:01.220
that you don't get in. chronicle sources in the
00:17:01.220 --> 00:17:03.580
early Middle Ages, right? It says, oh, the king
00:17:03.580 --> 00:17:06.000
died this year, but it doesn't say anything about,
00:17:06.119 --> 00:17:09.519
you know, that kind of fine detail of what life
00:17:09.519 --> 00:17:12.019
was actually like for people. So the resolution
00:17:12.019 --> 00:17:14.599
is extraordinary. The king really liked lettuce,
00:17:14.660 --> 00:17:18.579
for example. He was vegetarian for like these
00:17:18.579 --> 00:17:22.799
many months. Something else Sam has found out
00:17:22.799 --> 00:17:24.579
is that actually kings were pretty vegetarian
00:17:24.579 --> 00:17:27.880
in this period. That is interesting. Thank you
00:17:27.880 --> 00:17:30.400
for that explanation, Sam. Thinking specifically
00:17:30.400 --> 00:17:33.180
about your work in Alton, you draw attention
00:17:33.180 --> 00:17:36.460
to six case studies. Could you talk to us about
00:17:36.460 --> 00:17:39.720
why you chose these six individuals and go over
00:17:39.720 --> 00:17:42.980
some of your findings? Yeah, so we highlighted
00:17:42.980 --> 00:17:46.619
three. males and three females as sort of some
00:17:46.619 --> 00:17:48.519
of our key individuals plus some others scattered
00:17:48.519 --> 00:17:50.240
throughout that were just really cool that we'll
00:17:50.240 --> 00:17:53.460
probably bring up in in other parts essentially
00:17:53.460 --> 00:17:57.099
these six people have periods of dietary stress
00:17:57.099 --> 00:17:59.039
and that's what we really wanted to highlight
00:17:59.039 --> 00:18:00.619
as part of this sort of grand narrative that
00:18:00.619 --> 00:18:03.430
people often don't talk about people possibly
00:18:03.430 --> 00:18:06.589
going through famine or other types of dietary
00:18:06.589 --> 00:18:08.650
stress that might be linked to illness. What
00:18:08.650 --> 00:18:11.150
was really interesting for us was the three men
00:18:11.150 --> 00:18:14.150
there all had the exact same sort of stress event
00:18:14.150 --> 00:18:17.529
starting around 10 to 11 years old. And as far
00:18:17.529 --> 00:18:19.470
as we can tell at the moment from the one tooth
00:18:19.470 --> 00:18:21.910
we've sampled up till when that tooth root finishes
00:18:21.910 --> 00:18:26.789
at about 15. And this could be obviously famine
00:18:26.789 --> 00:18:28.250
or something, but the fact that all the men are
00:18:28.250 --> 00:18:30.369
having it at around the time of sort of starting
00:18:30.369 --> 00:18:33.109
puberty, that might be. you know, essentially
00:18:33.109 --> 00:18:34.369
their bodies are really stressed because they're
00:18:34.369 --> 00:18:36.690
going through a growth spurt or something, right?
00:18:37.109 --> 00:18:40.150
But the women are really interesting. So all
00:18:40.150 --> 00:18:41.849
six of these people, we sampled the same tooth.
00:18:41.970 --> 00:18:44.930
So it's the exact same period of late childhood,
00:18:45.109 --> 00:18:46.970
early adolescence that we're looking at. The
00:18:46.970 --> 00:18:50.569
women have that same sort of end bit there, 10
00:18:50.569 --> 00:18:53.309
to 15, having stress, possibly puberty and other
00:18:53.309 --> 00:18:55.390
things, or all six of these people could have
00:18:55.390 --> 00:18:57.509
been going through the same famine, potentially.
00:18:57.769 --> 00:18:59.650
It's very kind of hard to know at this point
00:18:59.650 --> 00:19:02.559
if that's the case. But the women have this earlier
00:19:02.559 --> 00:19:06.079
period of stress that's far more severe than
00:19:06.079 --> 00:19:08.400
what the men are experiencing and it's really
00:19:08.400 --> 00:19:10.700
interesting that it's the women and girls that
00:19:10.700 --> 00:19:13.019
are experiencing that and robin's talked really
00:19:13.019 --> 00:19:15.099
eloquently in the paper about all the reasons
00:19:15.099 --> 00:19:17.720
why that might be you know for what's going on
00:19:17.720 --> 00:19:20.779
in this period and gendered access to food and
00:19:20.779 --> 00:19:23.559
two of those women are by far and away some of
00:19:23.559 --> 00:19:24.920
the most interesting people in that cemetery
00:19:24.920 --> 00:19:28.690
from an isotopic point of view, grade 14 and
00:19:28.690 --> 00:19:31.809
grade 43 are super, super interesting. And they
00:19:31.809 --> 00:19:35.109
have this thing called wet feet, which is essentially
00:19:35.109 --> 00:19:37.210
at periods of their life on those fine grain
00:19:37.210 --> 00:19:39.529
little slices that Robin was talking about that
00:19:39.529 --> 00:19:42.849
we do, they get very, very wet. Wetter than I've
00:19:42.849 --> 00:19:46.730
ever seen out of thousands of samples like this.
00:19:46.890 --> 00:19:49.390
Those two women in particular, and one of them
00:19:49.390 --> 00:19:51.430
is exquisitely specific. She kind of moves from
00:19:52.299 --> 00:19:54.119
around about two and a half years of age, probably
00:19:54.119 --> 00:19:56.180
living somewhere near Alton to somewhere really,
00:19:56.299 --> 00:20:00.079
really wet, Fenlands, wetlands, basically only
00:20:00.079 --> 00:20:03.140
capable as far as where around Peterborough in
00:20:03.140 --> 00:20:04.440
the Fenlands, if anyone kind of knows, north
00:20:04.440 --> 00:20:06.640
of Cambridge, heading up towards the North Sea
00:20:06.640 --> 00:20:08.500
and the Wash. And she's a really interesting
00:20:08.500 --> 00:20:11.200
person, but I'll kind of hand over to Robin for
00:20:11.200 --> 00:20:14.980
some of that. And she has, her brooches actually
00:20:14.980 --> 00:20:18.269
come from... that area of the Fenlands too. So
00:20:18.269 --> 00:20:21.049
it's interesting. So one of the things that we
00:20:21.049 --> 00:20:26.869
can see with these women is that the women that
00:20:26.869 --> 00:20:28.950
we looked at go through two periods of stress,
00:20:29.109 --> 00:20:31.690
not one. So that's an interesting gender difference.
00:20:31.970 --> 00:20:34.970
And it could be linked to puberty. It could be
00:20:34.970 --> 00:20:39.170
linked to migration. So boys are fostered out,
00:20:39.210 --> 00:20:41.769
we think, at some age that they might be moving
00:20:41.769 --> 00:20:45.769
household. The women are... Are they being married
00:20:45.769 --> 00:20:48.009
off? Are they being trafficked? We don't exactly
00:20:48.009 --> 00:20:50.670
know what's happening, but they're also moving
00:20:50.670 --> 00:20:55.589
at 12 or 13 or 14. And so the kind of fine -grainedness
00:20:55.589 --> 00:20:59.150
of the story that the isotopes tell allow us
00:20:59.150 --> 00:21:02.470
to see life cycle in ways that we can't see from
00:21:02.470 --> 00:21:05.869
the written sources. One of the cool things about
00:21:05.869 --> 00:21:08.509
these Speculum Spotlight episodes is that we
00:21:08.509 --> 00:21:11.049
get to peek behind the curtain and learn about
00:21:11.049 --> 00:21:13.369
the stuff that doesn't make it into the article.
00:21:14.759 --> 00:21:16.960
How did this interdisciplinary collaboration
00:21:16.960 --> 00:21:20.680
come about? Well, I gave a paper on Zoom. I think
00:21:20.680 --> 00:21:23.039
it was Reading, was it? Reading Archaeology Department.
00:21:23.319 --> 00:21:25.420
And Sam was in the audience. And I said something
00:21:25.420 --> 00:21:27.599
about, it was a paper that I was giving on pottery.
00:21:27.759 --> 00:21:29.519
And I said something about pottery that interested
00:21:29.519 --> 00:21:32.440
her because it has the potential of impacting
00:21:32.440 --> 00:21:36.160
people's oxygen isotopes. So she said, we need
00:21:36.160 --> 00:21:39.259
to talk. And so we talked and we said, let's
00:21:39.259 --> 00:21:41.680
collaborate. That's how it happened. Although
00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:45.519
Sam is known as an Uber collaborator. She's not
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:47.799
monogamous at all. She's collaborating as far
00:21:47.799 --> 00:21:49.720
as I can tell with everybody. Yeah, I mean, I
00:21:49.720 --> 00:21:52.420
just get very excited by other people's papers
00:21:52.420 --> 00:21:56.039
and data. Exactly. And yeah, I mean, that paper
00:21:56.039 --> 00:21:58.140
that Robin was given just made me went, oh, OK,
00:21:58.359 --> 00:22:00.019
we need to tackle this. Do you know any particular
00:22:00.019 --> 00:22:02.759
sites that would be good? Because most of my
00:22:02.759 --> 00:22:06.000
previous work had been on much later. periods
00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:07.880
for the most part, kind of the 7th century, the
00:22:07.880 --> 00:22:10.160
conversion period. And I was interested in looking
00:22:10.160 --> 00:22:12.759
earlier and looking at what was happening. And
00:22:12.759 --> 00:22:15.819
she went, oh, this one, these pots, let's start
00:22:15.819 --> 00:22:18.079
here. And I think, I mean, one of the things
00:22:18.079 --> 00:22:21.299
that we've decided over time is we're just going
00:22:21.299 --> 00:22:23.339
to do everything on this cemetery. We're going
00:22:23.339 --> 00:22:26.220
to... Isotope everything. We've radiocarbon dated
00:22:26.220 --> 00:22:29.240
everything. Sam is about to do the peptides on
00:22:29.240 --> 00:22:31.480
teeth, which will allow us to do a quick and
00:22:31.480 --> 00:22:35.119
dirty sexing of skeletons, which is much, much
00:22:35.119 --> 00:22:39.279
cheaper than ADNA, can I just say? And we want
00:22:39.279 --> 00:22:41.440
to do lipids on pots. We want to do everything
00:22:41.440 --> 00:22:44.859
you can do, not just on the select. What happens
00:22:44.859 --> 00:22:47.920
oftentimes in cemeteries is that the six people
00:22:47.920 --> 00:22:52.220
with the nicest jewelry get all the tests. One
00:22:52.220 --> 00:22:54.059
of the groups that really interests me are the
00:22:54.059 --> 00:22:57.700
people without any grave goods at all or children
00:22:57.700 --> 00:22:59.940
who tend to not. It's very hard to figure out
00:22:59.940 --> 00:23:02.819
who they are and what they are. And so by doing
00:23:02.819 --> 00:23:04.960
everybody, we're going to have a look at this
00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:07.579
community that I think hasn't been done for any
00:23:07.579 --> 00:23:10.799
other community. No, not to this level, I don't
00:23:10.799 --> 00:23:13.019
think. Yeah. I've been putting together all the
00:23:13.019 --> 00:23:16.779
radiocarbon dates that we have. And what our
00:23:16.779 --> 00:23:18.859
radiocarbon dating shows is that the cemetery
00:23:18.859 --> 00:23:22.359
began earlier and... ended more quickly than
00:23:22.359 --> 00:23:25.180
the original author of the excavation report
00:23:25.180 --> 00:23:28.559
thought. Is this life -changing? Well, for those
00:23:28.559 --> 00:23:30.339
people it is, because we're now actually putting
00:23:30.339 --> 00:23:34.240
them in their proper chronological context, right?
00:23:34.319 --> 00:23:36.819
We're not thinking about them in the wrong decades
00:23:36.819 --> 00:23:38.579
or wrong centuries, but we're thinking about
00:23:38.579 --> 00:23:41.359
them right where they should be. I think this
00:23:41.359 --> 00:23:43.500
project makes a strong case for the importance
00:23:43.500 --> 00:23:46.319
of cross -disciplinary collaboration for medievalists.
00:23:46.880 --> 00:23:49.440
Right. And I'm sure we have different motives
00:23:49.440 --> 00:23:52.180
for this. One of my motives is I want historians
00:23:52.180 --> 00:23:54.980
to pay attention to the scientific findings.
00:23:55.339 --> 00:23:57.220
And they're not going to pay attention to the
00:23:57.220 --> 00:23:59.359
scientific findings if they're only written by
00:23:59.359 --> 00:24:01.819
scientists publishing in scientific archaeological
00:24:01.819 --> 00:24:04.259
journals, right? It was really important for
00:24:04.259 --> 00:24:07.839
me to write about stuff like this in collaboration
00:24:07.839 --> 00:24:11.559
because I wouldn't have a clue how to drill a
00:24:11.559 --> 00:24:14.119
hole in a tooth, right? It's not what I do. but
00:24:14.119 --> 00:24:16.220
I can write about it and I can put it in context
00:24:16.220 --> 00:24:19.480
in a way that historians and lit people might
00:24:19.480 --> 00:24:21.960
actually pay attention to. So for me, that's
00:24:21.960 --> 00:24:25.660
a really important thing. Yeah, and I mean, from
00:24:25.660 --> 00:24:30.079
my perspective as well, I think the best, I guess
00:24:30.079 --> 00:24:33.359
the best service you can do to these people is
00:24:33.359 --> 00:24:35.619
to collaborate with a historian to put them back
00:24:35.619 --> 00:24:37.819
in that context. And I found that from some of
00:24:37.819 --> 00:24:40.339
my previous work. It makes it better and it makes
00:24:40.339 --> 00:24:42.559
the stories more engaging. Otherwise, yeah, you're
00:24:42.559 --> 00:24:44.599
just kind of talking about graphs and like this
00:24:44.599 --> 00:24:47.500
one person is a dot over here. You know, there's
00:24:47.500 --> 00:24:50.960
it's fine. There's a place for that sort of stuff.
00:24:51.079 --> 00:24:53.059
But I think the methods are at a point now where
00:24:53.059 --> 00:24:56.059
it's pretty par for the course in bioarchaeology.
00:24:56.059 --> 00:24:59.279
And some of those papers are relatively dry and
00:24:59.279 --> 00:25:01.720
boring. And what we really need to be doing to
00:25:01.720 --> 00:25:04.420
push all of this forward is to collaborate to
00:25:04.420 --> 00:25:07.369
really get back to that. individual and that
00:25:07.369 --> 00:25:09.750
body and that life course centered approach rather
00:25:09.750 --> 00:25:11.750
than just thinking about it all as data clouds
00:25:11.750 --> 00:25:15.230
in a very vague way and if you think about the
00:25:15.230 --> 00:25:17.769
way that excavation reports of cemeteries are
00:25:17.769 --> 00:25:19.529
written they're often written in the aggregate
00:25:19.529 --> 00:25:22.829
so you end up getting a description of a cemetery
00:25:22.829 --> 00:25:25.609
that it's got 200 years worth of evidence but
00:25:25.609 --> 00:25:27.809
somehow it's all kind of mushed together and
00:25:27.809 --> 00:25:29.730
what it describes is a time and place that never
00:25:29.730 --> 00:25:34.119
existed because People in 425 and people in 625
00:25:34.119 --> 00:25:35.940
are living in really, really different universes.
00:25:36.380 --> 00:25:40.140
So imagine reading one of these reports instead
00:25:40.140 --> 00:25:42.819
where every individual, instead of just getting
00:25:42.819 --> 00:25:45.740
their grave goods listed, every individual has
00:25:45.740 --> 00:25:48.619
a little biography and you put them in chronological
00:25:48.619 --> 00:25:51.759
order and then you make some sense out of both
00:25:51.759 --> 00:25:53.460
the individuals and the community in which they
00:25:53.460 --> 00:25:55.059
lived. I mean, it would be a different way of
00:25:55.059 --> 00:25:59.940
writing this material. Yes, you are literally
00:25:59.940 --> 00:26:04.240
humanizing these individuals. So before we leave,
00:26:04.339 --> 00:26:07.019
what's next for the project? Well, Sam's busy
00:26:07.019 --> 00:26:10.380
right now with a team of master students and
00:26:10.380 --> 00:26:15.200
postdocs. Exactly. Yeah, we've got a small army
00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:17.839
in the lab at the minute. So like Robin said,
00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:21.940
trying to do some peptide sexing to work out.
00:26:22.299 --> 00:26:23.980
particularly for the kids. They're very hard
00:26:23.980 --> 00:26:26.119
to look at their bones and use osteologists.
00:26:26.160 --> 00:26:29.160
You kind of can't work out what sex of skeleton
00:26:29.160 --> 00:26:31.880
is before puberty. So that will be really interesting.
00:26:32.740 --> 00:26:35.779
Right. And again, what people did in the past
00:26:35.779 --> 00:26:38.519
was use grave goods, right? But that's putting
00:26:38.519 --> 00:26:41.440
somebody's gender expectations on these bodies.
00:26:42.910 --> 00:26:44.910
exactly it's better not to do that so yeah we're
00:26:44.910 --> 00:26:46.930
hoping to like disentangle all of those things
00:26:46.930 --> 00:26:49.309
as well which will be really fantastic and we're
00:26:49.309 --> 00:26:51.990
doing a lot of work on the cremations so that's
00:26:51.990 --> 00:26:53.349
something that kind of didn't make it into this
00:26:53.349 --> 00:26:55.990
paper but we're hoping to kind of bring that
00:26:55.990 --> 00:26:58.190
out so again we can't sort of work out what they're
00:26:58.190 --> 00:27:00.029
eating because when they get burnt all of that
00:27:00.029 --> 00:27:02.230
nice collagen goes goes bye -bye but we're doing
00:27:02.230 --> 00:27:04.490
radiocarbon dating and some other isotopes to
00:27:04.490 --> 00:27:06.490
work out if these people were any more mobile
00:27:06.490 --> 00:27:08.990
than the people who were buried full body with
00:27:08.990 --> 00:27:12.329
stuff and then hopefully also doing residues
00:27:12.329 --> 00:27:15.109
on on the pots both from the cremations and ones
00:27:15.109 --> 00:27:17.210
in with the inhumations to work out what was
00:27:17.210 --> 00:27:19.069
cooked in there and if some of these funerary
00:27:19.069 --> 00:27:21.670
urns adjust for the funeral or if it was you
00:27:21.670 --> 00:27:24.349
know you bury grandma in her favorite um cooking
00:27:24.349 --> 00:27:29.970
pot or yeah yeah bury me in my dutch oven yeah
00:27:36.359 --> 00:27:39.319
Well, Sam, Robin, thank you for joining us today
00:27:39.319 --> 00:27:41.599
to discuss your article. Well, thanks for doing
00:27:41.599 --> 00:27:43.960
it. We're always happy to talk about our work.
00:27:44.119 --> 00:27:46.819
Thanks so much. It's been great. Many thanks
00:27:46.819 --> 00:27:49.359
to John, Robin, and Sam for this fascinating
00:27:49.359 --> 00:27:53.539
conversation. You can read their article, Rethinking
00:27:53.539 --> 00:27:56.539
Grand Narratives, Mobility, Diet, and Health
00:27:56.539 --> 00:27:58.880
in a Small Corner of Early Medieval Hampshire,
00:27:59.259 --> 00:28:02.599
free of charge on the Speculum website at the
00:28:02.599 --> 00:28:06.390
University of Chicago Press. Let me also thank
00:28:06.390 --> 00:28:09.730
the Multicultural Middle Ages team, Will Beattie,
00:28:09.849 --> 00:28:13.730
Lauren Lee, Rita Mara, Logan Quigley, and Jonathan
00:28:13.730 --> 00:28:17.369
Correa -Reyes. In addition, I want to thank the
00:28:17.369 --> 00:28:20.849
Speculum Editorial Board, staff members Taylor
00:28:20.849 --> 00:28:24.569
McCall, Carol Anderson, and Esther German, the
00:28:24.569 --> 00:28:27.650
Graduate Committee of the MAA, and the Medieval
00:28:27.650 --> 00:28:30.869
Academy itself for co -sponsoring this podcast.
00:28:31.369 --> 00:28:34.900
Music for the MMA is by Anna O 'Connell. I'm
00:28:34.900 --> 00:28:37.660
Barbara Newman, editor of Speculum, the journal
00:28:37.660 --> 00:28:40.339
of the Medieval Academy of America, published
00:28:40.339 --> 00:28:44.079
by the University of Chicago Press. If you join
00:28:44.079 --> 00:28:46.900
the Medieval Academy, you will receive a subscription
00:28:46.900 --> 00:28:51.220
to both print and digital editions. Online, you
00:28:51.220 --> 00:28:55.740
can find us at journals .uchicago .edu. We'll
00:28:55.740 --> 00:28:59.759
be back in October with the next episode of Speculum
00:28:59.759 --> 00:29:00.359
Spotlight.
