The material record of the Migration Period is dominated by the furnished burial, in which a body is buried dressed and equipped, with weapons, brooches, vessels and personal ornament. Its distribution and its changes over time are one of the main ways the movements of the period are traced at all, though the relationship between a burial style and an ethnic identity is contested and no longer read as simply as it once was. Bracteates, thin stamped gold discs worn as pendants, carry images that are usually read as religious: a head, a horse, a bird, sometimes with runic characters around the edge.
The earliest runic inscriptions belong to this period, and they are short, on weapons, brooches and stones, giving names, makers and occasionally formulas whose meaning is uncertain. Taken together the evidence establishes that religion was practised and gives a rough sense of its imagery, without supplying a single sentence of doctrine. The atlas keeps the Migration Period distinct from the Viking Age, which is a later northern movement with its own chronology and its own evidence, because collapsing the two produces a single imagined Germanic paganism that the material does not support.