The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Roman Britain: civil and rural society
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and Mattingly 1990). This stemmed from two largely unstated preoccupations. The first was that
it was in the south and east that the Britons were visibly Romanized. Thus in the south and east
it was possible to study the assimilation of the native population to a ‘higher’, Mediterraneanderived
civilization. The second was that in the north and west, the same focus on the study of
Roman-style monuments and material meant an almost exclusive concentration on military
archaeology (Chapter 8), which also fitted into the separate sub-discipline of the study of the
Roman army on an Empire-wide basis (Figure 9.1). This led to a neglect of the archaeology of
the civil population, which exhibited little or no sign of Romanization, and whose often
insubstantial remains made for difficult, sometimes dull, digging.
APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD
Overview
As a result of those factors outlined above, the study of the civil population long concentrated
on those site-, monument- and artefact-types that were archaeologically highly visible and attested
to the influence of Rome on her most north-westerly province. Foremost amongst these were
the towns, acknowledged hallmark of Graeco-Roman civilization. The effect of Rome on the
countryside was seen in the spread of villas, the quasi-Roman residences of those with the means
and the wish to define themselves as part of the new imperial order. Whereas town-dwellers and
villa-owners can have formed only a tiny, if influential, fraction of the total population, the
evidence of temples and shrines might stand for the more intangible but hugely important sphere
of the impact of Rome on the realms of thought and belief of a wider spectrum of the populace.
So also might the sculpture, mosaics and wall-paintings found in towns, villas and temples, where
‘Roman’ and ‘native’ elements might be disentangled, incidentally throwing light back onto the
intractable problems of Iron Age religion (Henig 1984; 1995). Burial, though, so vital a source of
information on demography, social structure and religious practice in so many periods of British
archaeology, has until very recently been almost totally neglected by students of Roman Britain,
though thousands of burials are known (almost all from the south and east) (Philpott 1991).
The Roman period in Britain is also (in) famous for the huge numbers of artefacts that entered
the archaeological record; their technological competence means that the inorganic ones persist
in quantity (de la Bédoyère 1988). By far the commonest is pottery, traditionally much used as
evidence for dating, but also available for analysis of, for instance, trade or exchange, site function,
and the changing consumption of food and drink. Coins have also obviously been much exploited
for their dating potential, but more recent studies have shown their usefulness for inter-site
comparisons (Reece 1987). Other classes of artefact such as glass, metalwork and organic materials
all have their own protocols of study.
Developments since 1945
The study of Roman Britain since the Second World War has been affected by many of the wider
developments in archaeological method and thought, though often less radically than for other
periods. The application of techniques derived from the physical and chemical sciences has
contributed relatively little to our understanding of the period. For instance, radiocarbon dating
has been little used, since on the whole the dating derived from historically datable artefacts
provides a cheaper and more secure framework. As has also been noted in regard to military
installations (Chapter 8), dendrochronology can be even more precise and certain than artefacts,
and is beginning to have an appreciable impact on the dating of sites with suitable conditions of
preservation, such as within London. Another technique that has proved valuable is ceramic