The publication of the Blacknall Field cemetery excavations (previously known as ‘Black Patch’), situated in Pewsey, north Wiltshire, has been much anticipated by those concerned with research on Anglo-Saxon Wiltshire and Wessex. It is a pleasure to see this now in print, well presented and richly illustrated, with a detailed series of chapters that discuss the grave goods and human remains and provide an interpretative overview assessing the social structure of the cemetery and the rural community that created and used it in the late fifth to early sixth centuries.

The publication of the field excavations conducted by Ken Annable in the 1960s and 1970s has been made possible by the hard work and editorial oversight of Dr Bruce Eagles, well known to early medieval archaeologists for his detailed and important work reconstructing the Anglo-Saxon presence and culture in Wiltshire in the fifth to seventh centuries. In this publication, Eagles has successfully brought together Annable's excavation records with an array of specialist contributions by numerous established academics in the field of early Anglo-Saxon cemetery studies and added a highly detailed and valuable set of contextual chapters and sections that place this cemetery within its regional and wider Anglo-Saxon contexts.

Blacknall Field comprises a small community cemetery of some one hundred burials, active for a surprisingly short period, spanning the years from c ad 475 to 550. Although the full extent has not been revealed, the cemetery is shown to have been poly-focal in organization, possibly arranged around kin-group plots. Although bi-ritual, the majority of graves were inhumations, and many were accompanied by rich assemblages with brooch and weapon sets, signalling the significant status of many of those buried within the cemetery. The jewellery sets, dress fittings and weaponry buried with the dead signal the close association of this community with those burying their dead in the Upper Thames Valley, the East Midlands, the Lower Thames and Kent in the same time-frame but, in addition, relatively unusual links are also signalled with communities in East Anglia and Sussex.

There are many points of interest arising from the publication of this cemetery, including a male grave (no. 68) accompanied by a pouch of tools containing an awl, knives and tweezers. The awl is suggested to be analogous to that found in the Tattershall Thorpe smith's grave in Lincolnshire, thus adding another potential metal-worker's grave to a growing list. The range of surviving evidence for plant and vegetable remains, and the interesting discussion that contextualizes it, raises awareness of another growing data set – the evidence for plant material used to pack and line graves and cover the body and perhaps, alongside this functional role, serve magical or prophylactic purposes as well. The analysis of human remains also revealed the male adults in this community had experienced a significant level of weapon-inflicted violence; indeed, a high proportion of the male adults were buried with swords, including an example of an old and repaired weapon that had been kept, perhaps as an heirloom, for several generations.

The specialist contributions are extremely valuable in both their detail and the breadth of information provided in terms of context. Dickinson's discussion of the brooch sets, for example, not only determines the types and chronological range of the dress accessories but uses them to argue for a small group whose members maintained a continual communal connection with several other areas of Anglo-Saxon England. Nick Stoodley's close assessment of the graves and their assemblages provides a significant section on gender and gender signalling within the mortuary ritual of this particular community, including the identification of a small number of male graves accompanied by individual ‘female’ items, such as individual beads and a toe ring.

This is a well-produced and well-illustrated volume; indeed, many of the large colour images allow the grave goods and their decoration to be scrutinized in some detail. Not only does it bring this cemetery into the wider academic debate and offer a range of new information on early Anglo-Saxon burial rites; through a series of highly detailed chapters containing considerable contextual information, the cemetery and its finds are set firmly within the local and regional context of the western limit of Saxon settlement. The discussions and close analysis of the funerary rites at Blacknall reveal a small, healthy and comparatively wealthy rural community, connected to its immediate and wider locality, with links to communities to the north, east and south and with access to the continent too.