TABLE OF CONTENTS Paul Budd [1] , Carolyn Chenery [2] , Janet Montgomery [3] , Jane Evans [4] , and Dominic Powlesland [5]
The large number of burials and early date of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery and associated settlement at West Heslerton in North Yorkshire, UK1 present an excellent opportunity to investigate the possibility of large-scale immigration to eastern England in the early medieval period. The term 'Anglo-Saxon' embodies an idea of ethnicity based on an assumption of large-scale immigration or invasion. It also links to the associated theory of widespread displacement of the 'native', sub-Roman, British, population in the 5th and 6th centuries AD2 ,3. There is abundant material cultural evidence that this period saw major changes in patterns of settlement, land-use and funerary practices. Using modern mass spectrometery techniques however, we are now able to produce independent scientific data to test the long-standing hypothesis that these changes involved significant movement of people from northern Continental Europe and Scandinavia.
The West Heslerton cemetery is one of two, each centred on earlier Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age ritual sites on the southern edge of the Vale of Pickering (Figure 1), and each with a near-by settlement. The cemetery was in use ca. AD 400 650 and probably originally contained'about 300...
