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

Chapter Eight
Roman Britain
The military dimension
W.S.Hanson
SETTING THE SCENE
The Roman army was one of the most successful in history, and the Roman acquisition of an
empire was primarily a result of that success. Britain was one of the last additions to Roman territory,
and the province has been one of the most intensively and extensively studied of the Empire.
It is not proposed here to provide a narrative of the military conquest and occupation of
Britain. In the space available it could not provide anything but a superficial coverage, and such
historical accounts are quite commonplace. For detailed discussion of that narrative the reader
may turn to any one of several books (e.g. Salway 1981; Todd 1981; Frere 1987). The broad
chronological outline, therefore, has been provided here in tabular form, indicating the prime
sources of information for each chronological event (Table 8.1). This leaves this account free to
concentrate more on particular issues and problems, and to demonstrate the way in which
archaeological evidence both is integrated into that account and facilitates its expansion in detail.
In chronological terms, this chapter follows on from that on the Iron Age which precedes it,
though with a certain amount of overlap, both chronologically and culturally, since the basic
fabric of Iron Age society did not suddenly and ubiquitously become Roman. The chapter parallels,
chronologically, Chapter 9, dealing with civil and rural society in Roman Britain, and links into
Chapter 10 on the archaeology of the early historic period. As with all interfaces between periods
defined by modern scholars, there is no clearly defined break, but rather elements of overlap and
continuity, all the more so as some of the peoples who had been raiding the shores of the Roman
province in the fourth century AD became settlers in the fifth.
Regional strengths and weaknesses in the evidence
Because of the way in which the Province developed and, in particular, the failure to complete
the conquest of the whole island, the main geographical focus of any consideration of the military
dimension of Roman Britain is on the frontier zone in the north and west. Because much of the
area involved falls into the upland zone, which, historically, has been more sparsely occupied and
less extensively developed, the state of preservation of many of the archaeological sites is high.
Furthermore, because the Roman conquest has been a subject of interest since the earliest days
of the development of archaeology as a discipline, many of these sites have been subject to
archaeological investigation. By contrast, however, with the exception of some well-preserved
late coastal defence sites (e.g. Maxfield 1989), Roman military remains in the south and east of the