A Landscape of Plenty: excavations on a Roman estate, Cambridgeshire

REVIEW BY PADDY LAMBERT

This report details the results of a large (3.56ha) excavation undertaken by Archaeological Research Services prior to the construction of the new Cambridgeshire South Police Station.

The result of the analysis suggests the site formed a substantial part of a large later Romano-British estate, primarily focused on intensive agricultural management of livestock and crops, a common feature in the region during much of the Roman period. Evidence for a central villa, or similar, primarily comes from the respectable amount of building debris found on the site.

Romano-British agricultural estates and their roles in wider social and tenurial developments are essential components to the wider study of a Roman province, which displayed distinctive variation but complex interconnectivity. This volume makes good use of figures and reconstructions, and is a welcome addition to the ever-growing corpus of evidence for the later Roman trend for extensive interconnected agricultural estates in the region and, most importantly, how they may have been linked.

Books King’s Seat, Dunkeld
Books The Historic Landscapes of Cornwall and Devon