BELOW Excavations of the legionary bathhouse within what would later become Exeter’s Cathedral Close. Exeter became the site of a legionary fortress just over a decade after the Roman conquest of AD 43.

Tracing the fluctuating fortunes of Roman and medieval Exeter

The 1970s were an exciting time for British archaeology, with large-scale open-area excavations in many historic city centres revealing a previously unsuspected wealth of well-preserved remains. But this was also an era when post-excavation programmes were under-resourced, and large backlogs of unpublished sites built up. So, is it worth publishing sites that were excavated around 50 years ago? The team behind the ‘Exeter: A Place in Time’ project, led by Stephen Rippon and Neil Holbrook, think it is – and here they explain why.

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Current Archaeology

March 31, 2021

Our perception of the geography of England is heavily influenced by the location of London in its south-east corner. If the Home Counties seem like the centre of the country, on that reckoning Exeter is a remote place down in the South-West Peninsula. That difference extends to the archaeological record of the South-West, which is of a somewhat different character to that found over much of the rest of lowland Britain, a fact that has led some archaeologists in the past to view the region in a less than positive light. But such generalisations hide a more interesting and richer truth. Perhaps because of its geographical remoteness from the political centre of England, Exeter was susceptible

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