The discovery of an extensive and long-lived late Roman agricultural landscape near Cambridge has added illuminating details to our understanding of a region that appears to have been home to numerous villa estates. With the project now published in full, Francis M Morris, who recently completed the post-excavation analysis for Archaeological Research Services Ltd, is our guide to the key findings.
Excavations at Fordingbridge, Hampshire, just outside the New Forest National Park, have revealed an important rural settlement that was occupied from the Iron Age into the Roman period. Traces of much earlier Neolithic activity were also found, with rare 5,000-year-old…
REVIEW BY JO DAY Imagining Roman baths conjures up scenes of mosaics and frescoes, perfumes, hot rooms and cold pools, and steamy air thick with watery sounds and chattering. These structures were so much more than just a place to…
A coin hoard spanning more than 200 years of Roman history has been found near the village of Barton Bendish in Norfolk. Discovered by metal-detectorists, the 16 coins are all silver denarii minted in Rome, and are thought to have…
Excavations at Achnacon, an abandoned township in the Scottish Highlands, have uncovered evidence relating to the Glencoe Massacre of 1692. This infamous episode targeted the MacDonald clan on the grounds that they had failed to pledge allegiance to the new…
The Culver Archaeological Project has been running for almost 20 years. Carly Hilts reviews a new exhibition exploring its discoveries at two major Roman sites in Sussex’s Upper Ouse Valley.
REVIEW BY TONY WILMOTT This volume describes the archaeology of some four centuries of the life of a rural farm/villa of modest wealth. It is also accompanied by a highly accessible GIS resource at The settlement developed from an…
REVIEW BY JACQUELINE PITT This monograph successfully compiles the results of a series of excavations into a comprehensive chronology of a former MOD site south of Bicester. Evidence for prehistoric to modern activity was identified, along with a significant medieval…
Archaeologists and historians tend to approach the early medieval period through the lens of what was lost after the collapse of Roman rule. In her new book on life in Wales between c.AD 300 and 1050, Nancy Edwards shows us what survived from the centuries of Roman control – in particular Christianity and Latin literacy – and the ways in which these were used to create new identities in a formative period in the development of Wales, as Chris Catling discovers.
Earlier this year Archaeological Research Services Ltd excavated a Roman farmstead west of Milton, on the northern outskirts of Cambridge, providing new insights into rural domestic life and adding to the picture of affluence in this area of Roman Britain.…
How did the construction of Hadrian’s Wall affect the communities living in its shadow? In CA 277, we reported on the apparent depopulation of Iron Age settlements in lowland Northumberland and Tyne & Wear after the Roman frontier was fortified c.AD 122. Now, Philippa Hunter, Rupert Lotherington, Clive Waddington, and Nick Hodgson describe how recent research and two developer-funded excavations in County Durham and Northumberland add to our understanding of the Wall’s social and economic impact.
REVIEW BY NEIL HOLBROOK Did all the buildings in the Roman countryside that we call ‘villas’ perform the same function? Were they mostly nicely appointed homes of people who had done well at farming, or country residences of the well-to-do…
It has been an undergraduate essay topic for the last 50 years and is a question that continues to challenge archaeologists studying the history of Roman Britain: what exactly is a villa, and is there even a simple definition that fits them all? The Association for Roman Archaeology recently brought together 20 experts to consider new discoveries, new interpretations, and the role of the villa in Romano-British culture, religion, and landscape. Their conclusions have just been published, as Chris Catling reports.
Evidence of a possible prehistoric ring ditch was also identified at the site
The musical instrument was crafted from a sheep or goat tibia shaft.
Review by Andrew Tibbs. A nalysis of ‘big data’ (large datasets of information) is a technique used to expose patterns for archaeologists to interpret, and it is utilised effectively in this book to undertake a detailed study of the rural…
Review by Stephen Mileson. This report sheds light on the development of an ordinary rural settlement over the long duration. Stratton was a stræt-tun, a ‘settlement on a Roman road’ – in this case, the road between Baldock and Sandy.…
Review by Simon Esmonde Cleary. Excavations in 2012-2013 on the north-eastern edge of Bristol revealed an area of landscape with evidence of human activity from the Neolithic to the recent past, but the most-plentiful evidence – which was excavated in…
Earlier this year, CA reported the discovery in Rutland of a stunning Roman mosaic featuring scenes from the Trojan War. It was inside the opulent dining room of ‘a sprawling late Roman villa complex, complete with barns and potential bathhouses’,…
The team also found the remains of a high-status, middle-aged woman who had been laid to rest in a lead-lined coffin.
This well-produced collaborative volume (with 12 subsidiary authors and two illustrators) presents – very timeously – the results of the 2018 excavation of c.4.5ha of development land on the outskirts of Ely. While intermittent use is attested from the late…
A long-running excavation in north-west Norfolk has revealed the remains of what is thought to be a middle-Saxon malting complex. Carly Hilts visited the site to speak to Eleanor Blakelock about what has been found.
‘The late medieval sheep of Britain have so engaged the attention of the agrarian historians that other aspects of stock husbandry appear to have been neglected. Our knowledge of the cattle of the period, and of how they were kept,…
At over 500 pages, David Mason’s volume on Roman activity in County Durham is the first comprehensive analysis of Roman military and civilian activity for this part of north-east England; many of the sites have not previously been examined in…
Thanks to modern scientific analyses, the every-day circumstances of Tuscany’s Dark Age peoples are no longer mute. One thing is certain from this excavation: objects and nature played an active part in transforming the primitive experiences of Tuscany’s 9th-century peasants and their early feudal masters into some of the most sophisticated lifestyles in Europe by the 12th century.
The film The Dig has shown that public interest can be engaged by a vintage excavation, and this book likewise recounts the results and evokes the mood of three seasons of digging, in this case in the 1960s. We cannot…
The report on this significant site is most welcome. While earlier and later prehistoric features were present, as well as a small Roman cemetery, the chief interest lies with the mid-Saxon oven/grain-dryer complex. This feature was clearly explored most determinedly,…
There really have been so few instances when Time Team sites have yielded any evidence pertaining to children - despite having dug more than 150 sites over the 13 years the series has been running.