The aim of this thesis is to offer a new way of viewing the sweeping social changes that gripped Western British society in Late Antiquity (defined as the fifth and sixth centuries AD for South-western Britain). In effect, it is an attempt to understand, on their terms, the active role the Late Antique Britons of the Bristol Channel region had in shaping their own social and cultural awareness following the collapse of Roman authority. This requires a theoretical approach that highlights both the dramatic effects on societies wrought by the ending of imperial systems; and how groups caught in this wake found various ways to rebuild, stabilise and re-conceive their social knowledge. In order to achieve this, I have combined aspects of postcolonial theory, as developed by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, with Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collective memory. Using this postcolonial approach to study both the region and period is new to British Archaeology. In this light, the culture of the Late Antique Bristol Channel region is seen as a post-colonial, or post-imperial, society-where the Britons who lived there met the challenges of life without imperial institutions by creating new social systems, knowledge and identities. This transition was influenced by a process of hybridisation: the discursive negotiation by groups with aspects of foreign cultural systems, and the ambivalent acceptance or resistance of them as meaningful according to local knowledge. The present thesis argues that, in the fifth and sixth-century Bristol Channel region, this took on an air of reconnecting with a collectively remembered, and ambivalently re-written, pre- Roman past that resisted the destabilised, failing, Romano-British cultural systems. At the same time, the Britons of the region encountered other contemporary cultures from the British Isles, Europe and the Mediterranean and chose to hybridise aspects of their material cultures or resist them altogether. As such, British material culture from the Late Antique Bristol Channel region reflects a hybridisation process that was a prominent feature of Late Antique culture change across Europe. This conclusion draws upon the archaeological evidence from three published sites in the Bristol Channel region: Dinas Powys, Glamorgan, Cadbury Congresbury, Somerset and Cadbury Castle, Somerset. From each of these, Late Antique architectural and defensive features, ceramic assemblages and collections of personal artefacts are analysed for their reflection of possible influences from other cultural sources and a collectively remembered local past. Through this, it will be shown that a regional hybridisation process amalgamated various aspects of social knowledge from disparate groups of the past and present. In addition, it is shown that Late Antique British culture and identity was not homogenous and, in fact, showed variations of hybridisation from site to site that were affected by local circumstances. Through local and regional social discourses, the Britons were able to re-build for themselves stable identities as successors to strong, pre-Roman, ancestors during an unstable period where the memory of the Roman Empire still cast a shadow on peoples' lives.