The conference ‘Assessing the Contribution of Commercial Archaeology to the Study of Romano-British Towns’ took place at the University of Reading on Saturday 30 November 2013.
Chaired by Cotswold Archaeology’s Neil Holbrook and to a crowd of 130 participants, the morning started off with a summary of recent work in London and in the towns of the South East, South West and in the Midlands and North of England.
Dominic Perring spoke of the recent, well-publicised findings in London, including the eagle and snake figure from Minories. He also talked about the early foundations of London, presented in his thought provoking paper, published in 2011.
Mike Fulford looked at the development of six towns including St Albans, Colchester and Winchester. A more considered focus has been to what took place outside the walls and he spoke of the impact of development on extramural territories. At Colchester, work carried out on the site of the Garrison has uncovered an Iron Age landscape that provides a context from which the Roman town developed.
The origins of Roman towns and suburbia provided the theme of Neil’s talk, using examples from Dorchester, Gloucester, Exeter and Cirencester. Excavations at Dinham Road, Exeter, had uncovered evidence of a courtyard, large aisled hall with veranda and ancillary buildings which appeared to have been the residence of a high-ranking official, thus suggesting Exeter was pivotal to the invasion of south west England. Neil also reminded us about the danger of over interpretation, and the problem of high-level synthetic publications with the data inaccessible.
Along with some exciting archaeological sites, including a pig farm, Paul Bidwell reported on the unusual find of a number of curse tablets in a town house in Leicester. Unusual in the context of a town, these legionary finds suggest Leicester played a prominent role in the military supply chain. This claim was further supported by the finding of an ivory box mount, depicting the jackal-headed Anubis, pointing to an eastern connection.
The afternoon, chaired by Michael Fulford, focussed on finds and the environmental evidence, with John Pearce looking at burial practice. He demonstrated a large amount of data, mostly Late Roman, has been recovered post-PPG16, with the beginnings at Folly Lane, St Albans to the pressing need for more radiocarbon dates. His look at material culture included ideas on status and cultural identity and the relationship of objects in burials to those in circulation.
Mark Maltby looked at the varying amount of data recovered and reported on by the commercial archaeology sector from Roman towns around the country, and provided some fascination data on butchery marks. We heard that splitting cow limb bones was a feature of town sites, as they sort to retrieve the marrow, but that none have been found on rural sites. He was excited by the evidence of the finding of pig slurry in a town context, as revealed by Paul Bidwell.
The botanical evidence for food supply in towns was discussed by Mark Robinson, as the Romans introduced dill, cucumber, olives, peaches and walnut, some of which came to be cultivated in Britain. We were also introduced to the grain beetle, an insect that can live in above-ground storage facilities, but not in Iron Age pits.
As ever, with an event such as this, the conclusions were thought provoking as the participants discussed the day’s papers. The papers, including one from the English Heritage Perspective, will be published by the Roman Society as a Britannia Monograph in late 2014/early 2015.
What happens next?
Keep up to date developments and future events on the Roman Settlements Project page.
