Following on from last month’s column on Worcestershire and Warwickshire, I will stay in the West Midlands for this column, moving north into Staffordshire. I have previously explored this region in a ‘run’ of counties visited across 2020 and 2021 – see CA 365 (August 2020) on Shropshire and Herefordshire, CA 368 (November 2020) on Cheshire, CA 369 (December 2020) on Derbyshire, and CA 372 (March 2021) on the West Midlands and Black Country. But there is so much more to offer in terms of the archaeology of this fertile region. Staffordshire has it all, from prehistory to the present day, spread across the pages of Current Archaeology.
Wetlands and moorlands
Staffordshire’s coverage in terms of prehistory begins intriguingly late. The one big surprise to me while researching this column was that the oldest sites featured only date to the Iron Age. If you are an archaeologist of earlier periods at work in the county, here is a chance to remedy this – please do submit an article to the magazine.
The sites in question, however, are superb – there is, to start, an Iron Age farming landscape at Fisherwick near Lichfield in CA 72 (July 1980), and a series of wonderfully preserved Roman sites, including Tollgate Farm near Rocester in CA 253 (April 2011) and Wall, again near Lichfield, in CA 381 and CA 383 (December 2021 and February 2022). The former included an in-filled well within a small industrial complex. Excavated down to a depth of 7m, this provided a wealth of finds of late 2nd- to mid-3rd-century AD date, including several leather shoes. The latter site is the home of a fascinating lead figurine – first unearthed in the 1920s – depicting a man from Sub-Saharan Africa, thought to be part of the grave goods of a 1st-century AD cremation burial. Such finds point to the cosmopolitan nature of Roman Staffordshire, with its excellent connections across Britannia and beyond.
