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

Roman Britain: civil and rural society
• 169 •
THE NORTH AND WEST
Towns, villas, temples and
archaeologically visible burials are
features of the civil archaeology of
Britain largely confined to the south
and east. Their co-incidence in time
and space strongly suggests that
they are all inter-related aspects of
the initial adoption and adaptation
of Roman culture and its
subsequent development into the
Late Roman period by the populace
of these regions. North-west of the
Humber-Exe line, however, these
Romanized elements were few and
far between. Some of the trading
functions elsewhere performed by
the towns may have occurred at vici,
the civilian settlements attached to
the garrison forts (Sommer 1984),
though to judge by the paucity of
Roman material on native sites,
exchange with the indigenous
people was not one of the prime
activities at the vici.
Settlements
In the north and west, the principal
settlement pattern continued to be
dispersed and the main settlement
type the enclosed farmstead, as in
prehistory. Aerial and other survey
has revealed large numbers of
settlements of this type in northeastern
and north-western England,
the Lowlands of Scotland and in
Wales and the south-west of
England (e.g. the Cornish ‘rounds’,
with their courtyard houses).
Figure 9.8 Line drawing of the mid-fourth-century probable Christian
mosaic from the villa at Hinton St Mary, Dorset.
Source: Tonybee, J., 1964. ‘A new mosaic pavement found in Dorset’, Journal of
Roman Studies 54
A combination of aerial and ground survey in north-western England and south-western
Scotland has shown very many of these sites to date to the Roman period, both to south and
north of Hadrian’s Wall (cf. Higham and Jones 1985). Whether this represents a higher density of
settlement than in late prehistory and the early medieval centuries is more problematic, since in
this area both these periods were aceramic and thus essentially undatable by field survey, so the
apparent peak in the Roman period may be more a reflection of the availability of dating material
than of actual population levels. Settlements still visible as upstanding monuments or on aerial
photographs or which have been excavated show that the number of structures at a site could