Lying at the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, the fort at South Shields (known as ‘Arbeia’) was the main destination for seaborne supplies to the northern frontier, receiving goods from southern Britain and overseas. The resulting opportunities for trade saw a very extensive civilian settlement spring up outside the fort – a vicus whose remains, while largely built over by later development, survive remarkably well beneath the modern streets. A recent watching brief by Archaeological Research Services recorded buildings lining the road that runs from the fort’s south gate, and in the last few years developer-funded and community projects have brought further elements of the settlement to light once more.
These revelations add welcome new information to our interpretation of South Shields; at the time of the last Pilgrimage of Hadrian’s Wall in 2009, the long-running excavations in the fort interior were reaching completion – work that is now in the process of being written up for publication. Since then, the intervening years have greatly enhanced our understanding of civilian settlement outside the fort walls.
A series of excavations outside the west gate (published by Margaret Snape and others in 2010) showed that the settlement originated in the 120s or a little earlier. This first phase included a timber granary – confirming that the supply of cereals was important at South Shields from its very beginning – and would have been associated with an early fort, which is yet to be discovered but probably stood on the higher ground that lies south of the excavated stone fort which replaced it around AD 160.
Ancient DNA and ‘Anglo-Frisians’