Talk:Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain/Archive 7

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Genetics section

Proposals @Dudley Miles and Urselius:

• Move isotope analysis to archaeological sections
• There is too much sub-sectioning. Archaic and modern DNA are generally discussed together in sources, and we should do the same. Criticism should also be part of the same discussion (but perhaps moved to the top)
• Older information including I think everything about Y DNA is not needed.

Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:10, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

• I am busy offline at the moment but I should be able to look at this in the next couple of days. Dudley Miles (talk) 13:39, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Does anyone mind if I do the following:

• DELETE the Y DNA section. (Or move it to the historiography article???)

• I agree with moving this (and the modern population studies section) to the historiography article. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:29, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

• Move the isotope analysis sub-section from genetics to the archaeology section.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:45, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

• I agree. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:29, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Sounds ok to me, but see also the discussion I've opened in what the chronological end-point of the historiography article should be. Alarichall (talk) 09:37, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

OK. So that leaves it a bit open how much the pre-Gretzinger autosomal studies should be discussed but I won't touch those for now.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:37, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Genetics

@Alarichall - I'm splitting this off from the end point discussion as I could see that the thread was in danger of becoming entangled.

My view on the genetics and Anglo-Saxons is that there's a whole sea of stuff that doesn't seem to be covered in one place, although my searching so far may have been too superficial - but that's indicative of a problem in itself. And that's the genetic evidence as goes with all pre-historic migrations. For our purposes fifth to eighth century Britain could be termed something like "neo-pre-history", the Germans probably have a long compound word for it.

There's been a flood of genetic information and there are new techniques coming in every year and by and large it's been undercutting the extreme diffusionist case, and that goes for the Indo-Europeans, Corded Ware and Scythians more than the Anglo-Saxons. The impact of Genetic studies on our understanding of migration patterns probably needs an article of its own, and its impact on our understanding of how many Britons stayed around is going to be a prominent part of it because a disproportionate amount of the studies are in the British Isles.

So I would argue for a guided evolution, and it would go along these stages:

1. Create a methodologies sections in the Historiography article which talks about the impact of genetics but also archeology and linguistics, and also takes the stuff that's sprouting up in other parts of the Historiography article
2. Migrate the Methodologies bits in this article into their new home in the Historiography article, leaving tighter, less discursive and more current summaries of the state of play in this article
3. Within the historiography article find or create appropriate "wider" articles to put the material in and keep a summary, although longer and more discursive - than the one in step 2. So for Genetics it would be something like Genetics and Migration Studies, and perhaps a similar one for Archaeology (but I'm really not sure where that one would be at the moment). The work on the linguistics article has already been done, although there may be some tightening here and there.
4. If the Anglo-Saxon arrival is unbalancing these specialist articles and there is enough material then create a separate article in the same vein as Celtic language decline in England for linguistics. But that stage may never come.

This is purely a suggestion, and I'm sure there are plenty of ways of skinning this particular cat - and perhaps better ones. Open to suggestions.

JASpencer (talk) 12:11, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

@Dudley Miles - Pinging you as you've shown the most interest in Genetics. JASpencer (talk) 12:12, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

@JASpencer: I don't think everyone agrees yet that there is a large amount of genetics research about this type of topic exists in the form of reliable sources. There is a long running debate on Wikipedia about the fact that much genetic research posted on to Wikipedia is based on raw data from individual research reports. There is hardly any body of good secondary critique, but that is generally seen as necessary for a topic to be considered suitable for Wikipedia. But putting that aside I think you also have be careful to remember that this article the historiography article you've been making are specifically about a short period, and a very specific type of migration. The larger body of work I think you are referring to is really more of a topic for Genetic history of the British Isles. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:42, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

We are starting to see synthesis and also explicit engagement with history. But it is a fast moving field.

Anyway perfectly happy to see if the balance between Anglo-Saxon migration and genetic history of the British isles is appropriate before sticking my foot into the Genetics and Migration Studies hole. JASpencer (talk) 13:21, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Hopefully you can find sources.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:14, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I think that aDNA is very important for this article, but the researcb is at a very early stage and we have to be cautious how to deal with it. The only relevant article I am aware of, Gretzinger's, was published in 2022 and the most recent general books covering the period were published in 2021. We need to cover Gretzinger in detail, but I do not know of any other relevant sources. Dudley Miles (talk) 14:17, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes I was listening to a geneticist interviewing Bryan Ward-Perkins on the fall of Rome (only tangentially about the Anglo Saxons) and then asking him about his thoughts on recent genetic findings and he was very open that he hadn't really read them and had not engaged with what they would mean for his thesis.

And there are a couple or reactions which explicitly stated that along side some fairly sensible reservations at least a part of their reserve is the political encouragement that it would give the far right, which is laudable but is also a worrying sign around objectivity. Would they welcome the same findings if they saw them as spiking the far right case? (Although that makes sense from an American perspective from a British perspective the idea that the only plausible immigration wave in the last few thousand years to be larger than British post war immigration was in fact much smaller and so the post war immigration is largely unprecedented, does seem to significantly add to rather than detract from a far right thesis).

JASpencer (talk) 17:24, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I have tried to understand that last parenthetical bit yet, but looking at the rest... That has certainly been a concern, and I think rightly, in the first decades of population genetics. However I see people like Patrick Geary and Walter Pohl co-writing some of the big new autosomal articles. I think we can expect to see more balanced and realistic secondary literature building up. I just think we are right at the beginning of it.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:13, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Traditional narrative section?

With some of the areas being cut back, would it be a good idea to use some of the space to have a short traditional narrative - departure of Rome, arrival of Germanic troops, takeover of the East, resistance in the west, eventual overcoming, then Christianising and writing? And then go it's a lot more complex than that.

That seems to be the way a lot of accounts of the "state of understanding the Anglo-Saxons" accounts seem to start before saying that this is not what happens.

This could make the article a lot easier to understand for a new reader.

JASpencer (talk) 23:03, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

No I think that starting a traditional "just so" narrative and then saying it is wrong would not make things simpler! (It might feel simpler for the many readers who only read the first lines, because we would be treating them as idiots and misleading them!) OTOH expanding discussion of the written sources to perform a similar readability function is a reasonable long term aim, once we get stable definitions of which articles are the main articles for which topics. The current summary of written evidence is compact. It was pressured to be this way, and to avoid controversial emphasis upon Gildas or Bede, because of the current state of this article. It deliberately avoids being a dumbed down story. It could be expanded carefully in order to be more readable. Instead of a traditional narrative the section about written sources should provide a skeleton narrative of uncontroversial facts and basic possibilities which are the starting point for discussions in all fields. I think this is how good history articles generally work, and I could eventually work on that when other things are more clear.

However, there is a gorilla in the room. Why are you pushing for this now? This article is still too long, and the question of what material should be in this article is still in complete chaos because of the creation of new articles that don't yet have their topic boundaries defined. In particular you have specifically argued that discussion about the traditional narratives is going to be the speciality of another article, or do I misunderstand that? This implies that we should link to that article instead, which does not yet exist in such a form, and is indeed still under discussion. We first need to get consensus upon clear topic boundaries between articles. Otherwise we are going to end up with different editors working on competing texts, and editors starting discussions about text on one article which were actually copied from another article and then changed by editors who never looked at the sources used by the original editor. (Which I think is probably what has now happened in this case, and why you've come back to this article to ask for more material to copy over to "your" mirror article?)

There is also an elephant standing next to the gorilla, which is that although this important opening section has pressured into this compressed state, other editors who wanted less coverage of narrative sources have NOT been so strict in other sections, which remain bloated and unfocussed as discussed in other sections. There have clearly been vague ideas that the article will be more about archaeology or more about genetics, and a lot of fluffy placeholder text has been added. So we need clarity about whether we can shrink those as well. If we can't then we need another solution. So I am strongly opposed to your proposal at this time, because at this time it will lead to duplication, and it will complicate efforts to refocus these articles and reduce duplication.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:43, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps I should add that if there are questions or concerns about the sourcing etc of the current section about written narratives I would be happy to look at them if they are posted HERE, on this article. For me that new article of yours is still a controversial draft. The material it has copied and distorted from this article should still be discussed on this article. While materials are duplicated over so many articles it is very complicated to work out where discussions about semi-duplicated or competing text sections should be. That's part of the problem with this worsening duplication problem we have had on these Anglo Saxon articles. Eventually we should reduce all such duplication and replace much of our text with shorter remarks linking to the appropriate main articles, which ever they happen to be.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:52, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

@JASpencer: I've continued thinking about this and I can see arguments for including a very short mention of a "traditional account", as a second section, helping also give context to the current second section about the written sources. I'll try for something very short, linking instead for now to the current historiography article. IMHO however this needs to emphasize that several elements of the account are now typically seen as questionable by scholars. I just really hope we can get some progress on shortening other sections, because this article is too long! --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:07, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, it will need to stress that both the specific facts (e.g. Vortigen with Hengist and Horsa) are widely doubted and the general gist is strongly disputed. JASpencer (talk) 08:51, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

I've kept the new introductory remarks very short and general. So Hengist and Horsa are still in the more detailed discussion of written texts which come after that. This contains both elements of a narrative, and commentary (including notes of caution etc). It is maybe still a bit compressed, but we can work on allowing it to become more readable in the future.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:47, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster: your new section has no citations, do you intend to add some or is it intended as a summary of cited material elsewhere? TSventon (talk) 14:14, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

It owes a lot to Halsall's remarks on these topics. Perhaps some of the wording reflects wording I was looking at on the new article. I will try to add something, but let me know if you see anything specific?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:02, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Doesn't surprise me that it owes a lot to Halsall: his book basically takes the approach of telling the fairytale version first and then taking it apart, as we are now doing. Summarizing it early on, with appropriate warning signs, does strike me as one of the easier ways to address the pervasiveness of the traditional narrative. Alarichall (talk) 08:17, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I am not sure what you mean, or if you are proposing something. The information is cited from Halsall, but not the structure. Clearly it was not my aim to tell a "fairytale version" first, so what are you looking at when you say that? Please be concrete.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:23, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, by "fairytale version" I mean the account of events offered by Gildas, Bede, and the Historia Brittonum. Halsall's book begins by summarizing this version of events, and it wouldn't be mad for Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain to begin in a similar way. Alarichall (talk) 09:47, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes but I agree. In a sense this was proposed in this thread, but not by me. What I've done in response is try to explain that there is a traditional narrative, but not really run through it. In a sense you could say the subsequent summary of written sources mentions aspects of the fairy tale as well, but only the aspects that really are the crude data that most academic accounts assume knowledge of.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:29, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I've gone further into the fairy tale and brought in that totally plausible Jutish mercenary duo Hengist and Horsa together with totally stupid Vortigern. It would be a great pantomime. If you're going to go trad, go full trad. JASpencer (talk) 20:39, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I've reverted you. This article is not about Hengist and Horsa, and your edits created duplication, and took the article off track. Please be more sensitive about avoiding duplication, sticking to a clear topic, and coordinating with other editors.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:02, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm not too bothered, but Hengist, Horsa and Vortigern are staples of the traditional narrative - even if they were often treated symbolically. JASpencer (talk) 21:21, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

So were a lot of things, including King Arthur, but we don't need to mention them twice. IMHO one of the biggest writing style and readability problems on Wikipedia is people all wanting to add all their favourite things to the top sentences, meaning that we end up with repetition, and sentences which are trying to say too much. That is why it is a good idea to have a clear aim for each article, and indeed each section. This section is only intended to let people know enough about the existence and problems of the traditional account, to help them follow the next section. That was the aspect of your proposal which I feel there was agreement about. I don't think we have any reason to go deeply into "fairy tale" aspects than we need to in this article. Please also remember that this article is still too big.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:36, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

It is disappointing that within minutes of me posting the above you inserted a fairy tale illustration in the place of the removed text (where there is not longer any mention of Hengist and Horsa) and removed the article length tag. This looks like something you decided to do purely to make some sort of point. The article is still too long to edit or read easily, and it has no room for the fairy tales, not only because of length, but also because this article needs better focussing and a structure. Allowing the fairy tales to become significant in this article will inevitably lead to further unfocussed accumulations of off topic materials, and keep everything else about this article difficult. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:09, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Chronological end-point of Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

I'm opening this discussion here and pinging @JASpencer because I know @Andrew Lancaster prefers us to discuss things here.

Although there's plenty of useful work that could still be done on Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, I think its overall scope and usefulness is now clear. Yay! Thanks JASpencer!

I think part of the function of Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is to move coverage of older ideas which are notable in their own right but no longer relevant to the scholarly consensus/current debate out of Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain. Non-fringe old ideas should still be surveyed in Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain briefly, of course.

What I'm now wondering is when in the chronology Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain should stop providing information in detail, and when Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain should start.

My suggestion (but I'm not strongly wedded to it) would be to wrap up Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain just before the explosion in genetic and stable isotope analysis research (around 2000-2010). By then, although a few philologists like Oliver Padel and Richard Coates (and lots of non-academics) still stuck by the massive-population-replacement model for the settlement, there was a consensus among historians and archaeologists that, at least at most times and in most places, the settlement involved fairly small numbers of migrants, to whose culture the local population assimilated.

The rise of archaeogenetic and stable isotope work has put the cat among the pigeons, and I think Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain could concisely summarize both the traditional view and the 1970s-early 21st-century counter-arguments, summarizing and linking to Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, but then focus on mapping out the current debate.

But I can see arguments to carving things up in various different ways.

(I remain keen but probably too time-strapped at the moment on developing separate articles about the settlement in different regions, each of which is definitely notable, which Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain could link to.)

Also (apologies if this is a bit patronizing): the last week of so working on Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain has been some of the most collaborative and productive editing I've been involved with on Wikipedia and I'm grateful to everyone (including the sceptical Andrew Lancaster) for their participation:-) Alarichall (talk) 09:23, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I think there is a standard WP approach we should (maybe even must) follow. We don't say sources aren't mainstream purely for reasons of age, but because of whatever the mainstream literature seems to be considering mainstream. In some disciplines this can mean we cite 20th century or even 19th century literature. In practice of course I think that as editors we have to use common sense about PARTS of texts which were written before the discovery of relevant evidence. We shouldn't for example quote a general criticism of DNA research, if it is clearly specific to old Y DNA studies. Does that not make sense to everyone?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:35, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

The Historiography article seems shorter and the situation seems less "dangerous" to other articles, in the sense that certain types of split cause viral problems. But coming to another point, I believe that apart from defunct theories a historiography article would probably be the main article for more philosophy "theory", or "meta" discussions? I am thinking especially of the last big section in this article, which seems too long for here? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:52, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

It seems that you're far less worried about this article now. Would it be OK to remove the merge proposal for now? JASpencer (talk) 13:22, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't think remove is the correct word? I think the article and title have changed and we finally got more feedback, so the discussion can be considered closed.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:22, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Just to say that I've renamed the ==Synthesis== section in Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain to ==Twenty-first century: genetics==. It's absolutely fine if we don't think this is the best name, but I think that article is subtle enough, and the present state of scholarship uncertain enough, that we can't present it as a simple 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' progression. Alarichall (talk) 19:35, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes that sub-title seemed strange to me, so I agree. The opening paragraph should maybe also be reviewed? (I think you should have posted this on the other article's talk page though?)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:20, 3 March 2025 (UTC)