Some styles evolved into spectacular forms in the new land, such as the helmets and weapons found at Sutton Hoo in eastern England. in western England, Roman-style pottery, tools, and architecture dwindled jewelry, swords, and houses began to resemble those found along the North Sea coast in what is today Germany and the Netherlands. When 19th century archaeologists began to dig up Anglo-Saxon houses and burials, their finds seemed to confirm the outlines of Bede’s tale. The new data suggest “significant movement into the British Isles … taking us back to a fairly traditional picture of what’s going on.”

With the Anglo-Saxons, the data point strongly to migration, says University of Cambridge archaeologist Catherine Hills, who was not part of the research. The results address a long-standing debate about whether past cultural change signals new people moving in or a largely unchanged population adopting new technologies or beliefs. show they derived more than three-quarters of their ancestry from Northern Europe. New DNA samples from 494 people who died in England between 400 and 900 C.E. Now, a sweeping genomic study, published this week in Nature, suggests Bede may have been at least partly right. Instead, they envisioned a small migration of a warrior elite, who imposed their imported culture on the existing population. Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes from what is today northwestern Germany and southern Denmark “came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives.”īut in the later 20th century, many archaeologists suspected Bede, writing centuries later, had exaggerated the invasion’s scale. opened the way to an invasion from the east. In the eighth century C.E., an English monk named Bede wrote the history of the island, saying Rome’s decline in about 400 C.E.

Conquer meaning