Medieval Migration to England Tracked in Tooth Enamel Study

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND—According to a statement released by the University of Edinburgh, analysis of tooth enamel samples collected from the remains of people buried in England between the end of Roman rule in Britain around A.D. 400 and the arrival of the Normans around 1100 indicates that migration to the island was continuous throughout the period. Tooth enamel is laid down during childhood and carries chemical markers of the local environment. Sam Leggett of the University of Edinburgh, Susanne Hakenbeck of the University of Cambridge, and their colleagues examined more than 700 chemical signatures in the samples, and determined that people came to England from the Mediterranean, northwestern Europe, Wales, and Ireland. Most of the travelers were men, but women were found to have moved into England’s North East, Kent, and Wessex regions. The chemical signatures in the tooth enamel also showed that people traveled to England from colder regions during the sixth and seventh centuries, an era characterized by climate fluctuations known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. There was also a spike in migration during the seventh and eighth centuries. “We didn’t expect to see a spike in mobility in the seventh and eighth centuries—well after the period of the so-called Anglo-Saxon migrations [in the fifth century],” Hakenbeck said. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Medieval Archaeology. To read more about the turmoil caused by the Late Antique Little Ice Age, go to "The Visigoths' Imperial Ambitions."