The Treasures found with pagan graves have fascinated for a long time. In contrast, the post-Conversion period used to be the poor relation of Anglo-Saxon burial archaeology. There are comparatively fewer sites and even fewer objects, which make dating and classification difficult. However, in recent years scholars, including Dawn Hadley, Victoria Thompson and Andrew Reynolds, have successfully combined evidence from material culture and written sources for the study of burial practices in late Anglo-Saxon England.The archaeological evidence from burial places and funerary rites in the post-Conversion transition period seems to suggest that there was little change. Historians, however, assume that the introduction of Christianity must have resulted in fundamental changes in this society which would have affected the way in which the dead are spaced and buried as well.

The division of Anglo-Saxon England into a pre- and post-Conquest period is fraught with difficulties. Some of this is linked to the expectation that the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons led to some form of coherent identity. For example, many archaeologists and historians accept that pre-Christian England was inhabited by different groups and composed of rival territories. Evidence for such differences is sought primarily in the burial context of early medieval England. The period after the Conversion, for a lack of discernible differences, is often treated as a mono-ethnic quasi-nation, where incoming groups (such as ‘the Vikings’) are regarded as an automatic threat to ‘English’ identity, and where contact with the continent is reduced to ‘source study’. In this milieu the prevailing culture is Christian and as a consequence the influence of the Church may have been much overestimated. The Conversion of the English, just as any other early medieval society, was a complex process. Patrick Geary has deplored the assumptions made about paganism on the basis of ‘half-understood habits’.Unfortunately, ‘pagan’ is often associated with an presumed belief system, and thus ‘religious ritual’ is often attested where no easy understanding is possible.

In archaeology, as well as in the study of text, structures are an important aspect of the overall analysis. Literature uses imagery, metaphors and metonyms to convey abstract meaning. Graves, too, contain what has been described as a ‘symbolic grammar’. Certain objects and their location around the body are taken as indicators of information on the status and social position ascribed to the deceased in death.