Description
Highlights:
- Legion: Tracing the impact – and the experiences – of the Roman army in Britain
- Frame of reference: Rare wooden funerary finds from Roman London
- Preserving the past: Highlighting the Welsh heritage sector’s rich history and uncertain future
- Piety and plague: Exploring evidence for life and death in Cambridge’s Augustinian friary
- Family ties: Examining ideas of kinship in the early Bronze Age
At its peak, the Roman army acted as a military, naval, and police force to about a quarter of the population of the Earth. Our cover feature explores its impact on the inhabitants of Britain – and what life was like for the soldiers and their families who were posted here.
If you’ll allow me a moment of nostalgia, our next feature brings a personal pang, as it describes the demolition of a place that hosted one of my first forays into journalism. While working on The Cambridge Student, I spent countless Wednesdays on the New Museums Site – and on our final day in the office in 2009, my co-editor and I took a marker pen and wrote our names on the back of one of the newsroom ceiling tiles (rather earnestly adding C P Scott’s dictum ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’) before slipping it back into place. With youthful hubris we assumed that ‘our’ tile would watch over other student journalists long after we had graduated. Now, however, that building has been swept away – and fascinating relics of Cambridge’s medieval Augustinian friary have been revealed underneath.
In order fully to understand the past, we need a vibrant, robust heritage sector. Our third feature focuses on such work in Wales, highlighting some of the key sites investigated by the Royal Commission.
Our penultimate piece takes us to Roman London, where a waterlogged cemetery has yielded rare evidence of coffins and a funerary ‘bed’. We then end by examining two strikingly similar Bronze Age burials found more than a century and over 300 miles apart.
Cover Date: Apr-2024, Volume 35 Issue 1
