National origins remain as important as they have ever been to our sense of identity. Accounts of the early history of the peoples of Europe, including the English, are key tools in our construction of that identity. The origins of the English might seem at first glance a well-worn topic – there are libraries of books on the subject, and politicians, teachers and journalists daily make confident statements suggesting there are clear, simple answers to all questions relating to it.Yet if you look at those answers, they vary considerably, and this is true of all accounts of early British history written since the fifth century AD, when the Anglo-Saxons are thought to have arrived in what thereafter became England.These accounts address the subject from different perspectives, and so come to different conclusions. National identity has been studied through a range of different types of evidence - historical, archaeological, linguistic and most recently genetic. This has caused problems of interdisciplinary communication. In this book Catherine Hills carefully and succinctly unravels these different perceptions and types of evidence to assess how far it is really possible to understand when and how the people living in south and east Britain became 'English'. Catherine Hills is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK. Richard Hodges OBE is Emeritus President of The American University of Rome, Italy. He is the editor of the Debates in Archaeology series; and his publications include Dark Age Economics (2012), The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (1991), Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne (2000), Goodbye to the Vikings (2006) and (as co-author) Villa to Village (2003), all published by Bloomsbury Academic. He has previously been Director of Archaeology for the Butrint Foundation, Albania, and Director of the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, USA. Used Book in Good Condition