Description
In this issue:
– Flixton Park: Saxon estate
– Stephen Johnson: interview
– Fishbourne: before the Romans
– Shiptonthorpe and Holme on Spalding Moor: Impact of the Romans
– Stonehenge: & English Heritage
Plus: News, Reviews, Comment, Diary, and more!
From the Editor:
We think the first kings of East Anglia were buried at Sutton Hoo. But what made them so powerful? The archaeology of the Ipswich area is providing some answers. In our first article we go to Flixton Park Quarry, where Suffolk archaeologists led by Stuart Boulter have been excavating what looks like a seventh-century royal estate centre.
Then we meet Stephen Johnson, Late Roman expert and now Director of Operations at the Heritage Lottery Fund. We ask how an archaeologist ends up a senior civil servant, and discover a man with a missionary zeal about doling out large sums of money – and lamenting a lack of customers.
We then become more controversial with a major article by John Manley and David Rudkin about Fishbourne before AD 43. The conventional wisdom is that Fishbourne only got going after the Roman invasion. After new excavations, the dating has been challenged, and we hear the case for a Romanised client-king at Fishbourne decades before the arrival of the legions.
Still with the Romans, we go next to the East Riding of Yorkshire, where Peter Halkon and Martin Millett have spent much of the last 20 years investigating an entire Roman landscape. What was the impact of a major new Roman road on an existing Iron Age community?
We encounter more controversy in our final feature, a vigorous riposte by Chris Chippendale and Ian Baxter on the official English Heritage (EH) line on Stonehenge. There is controversy, too, in our Diary section, where we look at recent TV archaeology and the debates over The Big Dig. Also in Diary, in the wake of the Valletta debate, we are pleased to publish a strong message of support for amateurs from EH’s Chief Archaeologist David Miles.
Cover Date: Aug-2003, Volume 16 Issue 7