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

• 160 • Simon Esmonde Cleary
petrology, in its ability to source fabrics of the ubiquitous Romano-British pottery and thus help
to establish patterns of distribution (Peacock 1982). The biological sciences, on the other hand,
have made possible major advances in our understanding of the ecology of Roman Britain. This
has enabled us to dispense with the traditional reliance on the Roman agrarian writers Cato,
Varro and Columella, who were concerned with the Mediterranean slave agriculture of Italy, and
replace it with an understanding based on the evidence from Britain itself. This has particularly
been developed from osteology for wild and domesticated animals, and by palynology and
palaeobotany for staple and relish crops and the overall management of the countryside and its
resources such as woodland.
Most important and striking have been the changes in the intellectual framework within which
the study of Roman Britain takes place. For the quarter-century or so after the Second World
War, such study was strongly empirical, its analyses dominated by questions and approaches
derived ultimately from the surviving literary sources along with epigraphic (inscription) evidence
(e.g. Salway 1993). This was particularly true of the military archaeology of Roman Britain, but
the tiny number of references to affairs in the civil side of the Province had a quite disproportionate
effect. Excavation concentrated on ‘Roman’ sites such as towns and villas, and explanatory models
were often drawn either from Classical authors (appropriate or not) or consciously or implicitly
from the experiences of the modern British land-owning and educated classes. They projected
back onto the Roman Empire the experiences and preconceptions of the elite of a modern
imperial/colonial power.
The successive intellectual movements and fashions that have swept archaeology over the
last 30 years or so have taken their time to dislodge this well-established tradition; some have
failed to make headway against indifference or antipathy. In other cases, the close relationship
between data and the generation and application of theoretical approaches has meant that
approaches devised for other areas or periods have not been seen as appropriate for the Roman
period, particularly when confronted with the great quantity and range of data from that period.
Nonetheless, with the rise of a generation that has grown up in and after Britain’s own retreat
from Empire and that has been trained as archaeologists rather than historians, a change is
coming about. Gradually, a Romano-British intellectual synthesis is being formed through the
interaction of new ideas and approaches from external sources with the indigenous database
and epistemology. Its characteristics include a marked concern for making explicit the theoretical
approaches of both past and present work, be it excavation or analysis. Allied with this is a
concern for the quantification of data, its statistical manipulation and graphic display, which
are particularly welcome in such a data-rich period. This has been underpinning the development
of an explanatory framework centring on social structures and development, reflecting the
importance of the ‘processualist’ school of thought (Chapter 1) in recent British archaeology.
It also seems particularly appropriate for investigating the processes that make up the
phenomenon of Romanization. Romanization was also a matter of more than the social,
however, and the concerns of post-processual thought with the symbolism and the mentalités
of societies are beginning to impinge on Romano-British studies, as are other strands such as
the archaeology of gender. The post-imperial consciousness of many workers is to be seen in
the increasing commitment to the less visibly Romanized part of the Romano-British population,
for instance in the north and west, and to the reasons and choices that lay behind the rejection
(or non-acceptance) of a Romanized culture (cf. TRAC 1993). These theoretical developments
co-exist, however, with a still strong, continuing empirical tradition, represented by the excavation
and the publication of sites and of works on classes of material or other aspects of the
archaeology of Roman Britain.