Description
In this issue:
– CHARTING THE ROADS: Surveyed frameworks in the Roman Conquest of Britain
– DOGGERLAND RISES: Exploring lands and livelihoods lost under the North Sea
– HAYTON: How Roman occupation redrew an Iron Age landscape
– WALES IN THE VANGUARD: Pioneering protection of the past
Plus: News, Reviews, Comment, Sherds, Odd Socs, and more!
From the Editor:
Twelve thousand years ago, Britain was joined to Europe bya great plain, where Mesolithic people lived and hunted. Butas water levels rose, their home was submerged beneath theNorth Sea. What did this loss of place mean for the wave ofmigrants it created?
Mobility of another kind is under the microscope elsewhere inthis issue, as an explanation is sought for those famous straight stretches of Romanroad. Their courses were sometimes cribbed from previously surveyed long-distancealignments, which were projected across a landscape regardless of whether a roadcould cross it. So what was this surveying for? Are the alignments vestiges of militarymapping in the Conquest period, as the empire sought to get a grip on exactly whatit was conquering?
Of course, Rome was not just in it for the cartography, and forts and roadsfollowed in the army’s wake. But how much impact did these have on local people? Arecently published project at Hayton, East Yorkshire, has examined how occupationunleashed powerful economic forces that redrew the human landscape.
In Wales, it is the heritage-protection landscape that has recently been remade.Forty years after the birth of the Welsh archaeological trusts, we take a look at whathas been achieved, and why the past is very much in the present.
Finally, CA is a bumper size this month, to give you a tasteof this year’s fieldwork opportunities. There’s plenty to lookforward to in the summer!
Matt Symonds
Cover Date: May-2016, Volume 27 Issue 2