This work is not so much a book as a collection of scientific and archaeological papers written by a team of specialists. It needs a similar team to review it, and I hope that it will be reviewed and publicised by different specialists to the range of audiences it aims, and deserves, to reach. This review is written from the perspective of an archaeologist specialising in the early medieval period in north-west Europe, therefore representing the principal user community.

It is an impressive book, weighty in content and form, which presents a new chronology for Anglo-Saxon burials from the middle of the sixth to the late seventh century ad. This is achieved by bringing together the results of high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected skeletons, and the typology and seriation of associated artefacts, modelled using Bayesian statistics. Aspects of the methodology are innovative and the results throw new light on the period of English history which saw the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.

Chapters 1–5 work well as solid foundations for the later analysis and, with a few caveats, could be set as required reading for students and those writing Anglo-Saxon cemetery reports. In Chapter 1 John Hines gives a good account of the history of the archaeological study of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, except that he gives insufficient emphasis to the recent current of thought which is hostile to the concepts embodied in this work. Many archaeologists working in this period have turned away from precise dating of the manufacture of artefacts – which may have had long and varied biographies before they were deposited in graves – focusing instead on social, ideological and economic processes and systems, in conversation with prehistorians rather than historians, theory rather than narrative. This omission is odd since Hines could have claimed this book as a definitive swing back of the pendulum, remedying the weakness of older chronologies and showing that perhaps it really is sometimes possible to use archaeology to write history. Chapter 2 on dating methods sets out the details of the scientific and mathematical processes involved. This is written at a level where a non-specialist reader could grasp most of it on third reading. The account of the project itself by Chris Scull, in Chapter 3, sets a precedent which all project reports should follow. Chapter 4 on human skeletons gives an account of the osteology of the skeletons used for ¹⁴C, including an interesting discussion of the issue of stature. The key issue of diet impact on ¹⁴C dates is comprehensively addressed but maybe not wholly resolved. Chapter 5, by Karen Høilund Nielsen, sets out new or revised typologies and date ranges for many categories of artefact. This is really valuable, and may become the most used part of the book.

Chapters 6–7 are the essential core of the book, setting out respectively the basis for the male and female chronologies. At this point, however, the non-statistician reader has to admit defeat: these chapters are exceedingly difficult to follow. Fortunately, Professor Michael Baxter has come to the rescue and I can only recommend all those who are not statisticians to read the commentaries he has written on these two chapters, posted online (Baxter 2014a and b). His verdict is that the statistical methodology is innovative and advanced but that the text should have been edited for readability, with the omission of many of the figures. As he puts it: ‘a much shorter and more accessible book is yearning to be born from the body of the present text’. A key virtue of the work is indeed, as with most things, its main drawback. The details of all the processes involved in constructing the chronology have been included. This is intended to make for a transparent and verifiable account of all aspects of the research but sometimes causes the opposite, with the wood entirely lost for the trees.

Chapter 8 provides a comparison of the male and female sequences, which are shown not to be the same. The incidence of furnished burial falls off steeply during the second half of the sixth century, but then fluctuates during the seventh, with a second peak for the female burials, but not male, in the middle of the century. The fluctuation in the incidence of furnished burial across the Anglo-Saxon period is an important finding. Chapter 9 addresses the problem that the new chronology disagrees with numismatic dating for the later part of the sequence. The arguments are clearly set out and it is good to see a debate like this conducted in public, not fudged. Chapter 10 reviews the results in the context of many aspects of Anglo-Saxon archaeology and history, another useful and comprehensive discussion.

In such a large and multifaceted book it is inevitable that many issues either remain unresolved or deserve further discussion. I will comment further on two topics: the date given for the end of furnished burial and the ways in which archaeologists may use the new chronology.

The end of furnished burial is modelled as ad670s or 680s, which means the dates of some burials fall earlier by twenty to thirty years than the associated coins suggest. The resolution of this debate will be very interesting: is it in fact because of the ‘fish effect’, making ¹⁴C dates artificially older, or can the coins be re-dated? The burial of St Cuthbert might also be relevant here. Either at his death in ad687 or during the first translation of his body in ad698 a gold and garnet pectoral cross was placed on his chest. If this burial had been excavated from an unnamed grave the new chronology would have dated it before the saint’s recorded death. It is, however, very interesting to see the increase in furnished women’s burials during the initial phase of Christianisation in the mid-seventh century, suggesting a strong role for women as religious actors, perhaps carried across from pre-Christian religious practice and reflected in Bede’s account of women such as Hild of Whitby or Æethelflæd at Ely. This certainly was suppressed in later centuries, if not by Theodore, as here suggested, then by other male clerics.

Archaeologists will be tempted to date the assemblages they are studying by slotting them into the published sequence. My concern is that this should not be given priority over recorded relationships in the ground. The authors encourage testing of their models and have provided the tools to do so in the database associated with the book, available via the Archaeology Data Service (ADS). However, given the complexity of the detail presented, few readers (including this reviewer) may feel competent to do this, and even within this book there is evidence of a tendency to give less weight to stratigraphy than seriation. My example is a site I know well, Spong Hill in Norfolk (Hills and Lucy 2013), a large fifth-century cremation cemetery succeeded by a small mixed cemetery in the early sixth century. Two inhumations in chamber graves were each surrounded by a ring ditch, one of which, around inhumation 31, cut the other, around inhumation 40 (Hills et al 1984, fig 1, 12). The shield boss in 31 (which had been robbed) is typologically earlier than that in the stratigraphically earlier 40, which also contained a sword scabbard of earlier date than the shield. This is not at all surprising: elaborate burials are likely to contain artefacts of varied dates and origins (cf Sutton Hoo mound 1). However, the stratigraphic relationship has caused ‘problems with the dating of shield bosses’ (Penn and Brugmann 2007, 59). This has been transferred to the database associated with the present volume, where the relationship is recorded as ‘complicated and debated’, which is not the case. What has happened here is that the modelled seriation has been allowed to take precedence over the stratigraphic reality. It would not make much difference to the rest of the book if the male grave sequence took account of the correct stratigraphic sequence for Spong Hill; my point here is that the chronology presented should be used as a complement rather than an alternative to independent evaluation of the evidence.

Used in that way this book will become a ‘standard reference point in Early Anglo-Saxon archaeology’ as the authors advocate, and they can be congratulated for their achievement.