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

Chapter Nine
Roman Britain
Civil and rural society
Simon Esmonde Cleary
INTRODUCTION
One of the briefest of the epochs of Britain’s past, the Roman period is also one of the most
recognizable. To the archaeologist, this is because it saw the introduction of important and
distinctive new classes of site, monument and artefact. More generally, it is also the period that
bequeathed legacies such as roads and towns that still shape the map of Britain. It also marks the
intrusion into Britain of Classical culture, the intellectual, literary and architectural vocabulary of
which are embedded in modern European idioms. It can therefore seem comfortingly familiar,
perhaps dangerously so for those whose business it is to investigate the ‘otherness’ of the past.
The distinctive dataset, links with the wider Classical world and some long-standing intellectual
traditions mean that the study of Roman Britain has often been rather self-contained. At both
the beginning and the end of the Roman period, however, an incoming group imposed itself on
a numerically far superior indigenous population. The archaeological distinctiveness of Roman
and of Anglo-Saxon material culture (Chapter 10) has meant that perhaps disproportionate effort
has been expended on the minority at the expense of the less archaeologically obvious majority.
One of the longest standing approaches to the analysis and explanation of the archaeology of
the Roman period has been the concept of ‘Romanization’, analysing the nature and process of
the interaction of Roman and indigenous culture to produce the synthesis known as ‘Romano-
British’ (Millett 1990; see also Chapter 8 here). This was not a process whereby the imperial
power imposed its culture, but one where the British population made choices about its relationship
to that power and about how to display those choices through the adoption (or not) of Romanstyle
behaviour and its physical expressions. This approach can be undertaken only with an
understanding of the Later Iron Age (Chapter 7 here) in order to identify and assess the changes
resulting from the Roman conquest. The links between the two periods and the transition from
one to the other are visible in the archaeological record, and currently the increasing emphasis on
the role of the indigenous population can lead to the earlier part of the Roman period at least
being seen almost as a continuation of the Iron Age by other means.
At the end of the Roman period, the interface between Roman Britain and Early Anglo-Saxon
England is much less well studied and understood, for the two material cultures seem to have
nothing in common, reinforcing the impression of ethnic, cultural and religious separateness
gained from the written sources. More recent research and excavation are suggesting, however,