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Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr Cat Jarman. Today we're going to go right back to the

first few centuries of the medieval period, asking the question of how connected England was

to neighbouring parts of continental Europe. And we're going to do that by tracking some

quite remarkable changes in how people treated their dead. Now to talk to me about this topic,

I have invited an archaeologist who has studied a rather staggering 33,000 graves from

Cemetery in England and other parts of Europe. So I'm delighted to welcome Dr Emma Brownlee

to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today, Emma. Thank you very much for having me.

Emma is a research fellow in archaeology at Gerton College and a fellow at the McDonald

Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. Now I'm going to be

asking you more specifically about your research on these early medieval burials in a moment, Emma,

before we get that far, just wanted to get a little bit of the background and kind of set the scene

maybe even clearer, but a few little myths about that particular pointing time if that's all right.

So can you just start by going really back to the beginning of the medieval period, so around

about 500ish or so, sort of the end of the Roman Empire in Britain? Can you just sort of very simply

explain what's the sort of situation that people find themselves in at the time? What sort of

influences do they have when that Roman period ends? So a lot of people think that when the Romans

...