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

February 1, 2026
This article is from Current Archaeology issue 432


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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.

A Landscape of Plenty: excavations on a Roman estate, Cambridgeshire
Francis M Morris and James E R Davey
Archaeopress, £60/free eBook
ISBN 978-1805831037

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