TY - JOUR AU - Cave, Christine AU - Oxenham, Marc PY - 2019/05/02 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - 7. Multiple Liminalitites in Early Anglo-Saxon England: Age, Gender and Religion JF - AmS-Skrifter JA - AmS-Skrifter VL - IS - 26 SE - Articles DO - 10.31265/ams-skrifter.v0i26.212 UR - https://journals.uis.no/index.php/AmS-Skrifter/article/view/212 SP - 91-104 AB - <p>Liminalities and ambiguities can be useful in identifying complex patterns in many areas of study. This paper examines two elderly&nbsp;burials from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery of Mill Hill, Deal, Kent in England. These two individuals display multiple liminalities,&nbsp;particularly with respect to their advanced age, gendered identities and in their potential religious beliefs. Their advanced age&nbsp;suggests they spent the last years of their lives in the knowledge that they were close to the ultimate transition: death. Moreover,&nbsp;being quite elderly has likely affected their gendered identities, rendering them muted, altered and/or de-gendered. The combination&nbsp;of their elderly status, their physical position in the cemetery and the phasing of their graves suggests they were the last two&nbsp;individuals buried at Mill Hill, possibly some considerable time after it had gone out of general use. Their graves are dated to the&nbsp;Final Phase or Conversion Period of Early Anglo-Saxon England when, among other changes, Christianity begins to become the&nbsp;dominant religion; this and the presence of an unexcavated cemetery nearby, with goods pointing to a later date than this one,&nbsp;suggests the possibility that these two individuals were the last pagans in their community. These are all factors which point to the&nbsp;multiple liminalities of the two individuals.</p> ER -