RAC/TRAC Session 13: Approaching the archaeology of urbanism in Roman Britain

Conference Sessions and Abstracts - Saturday 13 April 2024

13. Approaching the archaeology of urbanism in Roman Britain

Michael Marshall – Museum of London Archaeology
Sadie Watson – Museum of London Archaeology

Romano-British urban centres have been extensively studied over several centuries. Some, such as London, are principally known from rescue/development-led excavation, while others have been investigated through antiquarian/academic fieldwork. This session will consider the state of urban archaeological practice and understanding in relation to these sites and will explore potential directions for future work. How should urban archaeologists across different sectors contribute and collaborate? How can we deal with huge volumes of material and data, while still creating space for nuance? How might development-led contractors adapt research aims and methods to tell new stories and contribute to new debates? How can we mine archives and publications effectively to re-investigate and compare towns? What topics remain understudied or neglected? How can work on Romano-British towns be made more impactful and relevant to the modern world, or reach different audiences? What can work on Romano-British urban centres learn from and offer to other studies of urbanism?

Session schedule 

Abstracts 

 Re-evaluating the dating of Relief Patterned tiles from Romano-British towns
Han Li – Museum of London Archaeology

There have been many attempts to date the roller-stamped or relief pattern tiles in Roman Britain. It remains very ambiguous, and the common belief is that they were used from the 1st to the 2nd century. Many common patterns of relief pattern tiles, this includes box-flues and voussoirs are found in London as well as other contemporary urban centres of occupation. They include diverse fabric groups and roller dies. A recent attempt was made to redate all relief pattern tiles to the first century, causing some controversy and sparking many debates across the building material specialist community. This paper will explore and challenge this new theory, focusing on London and other towns, along with the kilns in the rural areas that provided tiles for the London’s consumption. Implications for the study of ceramic building materials and their use in urban areas will be discussed.

 Corbridge, the most Northerly Town in Roman Britain
Frances McIntosh – English Heritage        
Catherine Teitz – Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Like many sites along Hadrian’s Wall, Corbridge has a military narrative and chronology published by the big names of twentieth century archaeology. Despite the ink, Corbridge is far from ‘solved’; different aspects of the site, including its urban qualities, emerge from the finds, the monument, and the archival records of excavations. This paper will highlight how even a well-established site can be re-interpreted both through varied sources of evidence and by researchers of different backgrounds. Recent work has framed Corbridge as an urban space, expanding its role in the frontier narrative. This has involved tapping into the potential of the vast finds assemblage, re-assessing Edwardian conclusions and using archives to re-evaluate spaces within the site. Investigating the archaeology of urbanism here requires a reconsideration of its presentation to academic and popular audiences. Whilst academic circles are well-acquainted with life beyond the military on the frontier, the popular view remains focused on forts, soldiers, and the defence of empire. Working at a site, established both as an excavation and a visitor attraction, offers an opportunity to enhance the story for both audiences. Corbridge is a place to question what urbanism looks like in a Romano-British context, and especially on the frontier.

 Living in Roman London: considerations on the archaeology of Roman housing in a provincial context
Nina Bizziocchi – University of Cambridge

Since the 1990s new approaches in scholarship have highlighted how Roman domestic architecture had a peculiar social and sociological value. While this is particularly true for sites of the Mediterranean area such as Pompeii, this aspect of Romano-British townhouses has often been overlooked, partially as a consequence of the fragmentary nature of some of the evidence. This paper aims at discussing a possible approach to the archaeology (and the issues) of an urban context such as Londinium. More than 1500 Roman sites have been excavated in London and its major role in the history of the province makes it an interesting case-study to investigate Romano-British housing within the broader debate on ‘Romanization’ as a non-unitary, multi-agency process. However, the nature of its evidence and frequent lack of complete plans poses a series of issues, firstly that of the identification of a building as a ‘house’ within the archaeological record. While a proposed methodology will be discussed to consider how to best approach this specific material and its problems, some selected examples of housing structures will prompt a discussion on all the factors that contributed to the construction, and the social aspects, of this ‘provincial’ architecture, moving beyond a simple typological approach.

 Promoting Romano-British Durovernum Cantiacorum
Jake Weekes – Canterbury Archaeological Trust

Romano-British Canterbury sometimes seems a bit of an afterthought, or hardly to feature at all, in syntheses of Roman Britain and the north-west provinces. In this paper, I suggest some reasons why Durovernum has always been something of a subaltern place, and remark that these are the very same reasons why it is important and interesting as an example of a provincial town. Canterbury began as an important node in a late Iron Age peninsular Kent hegemony with connections in mainland Europe and the institution of the town is probably two-fold, embodying an important example of variation in urbanism in Roman Britain within one and the same town rather than in comparison with others. There is good evidence that the urban centre began as a Gallo-Roman style resort, only becoming like a civitas capital in the early second century. The relationship between this second town, which flourished in the second century and first half of the third, and the late antique walled version of the town (adapted in about 270 to 290) is irregular, fascinating, and again an important contribution to our subject that may have been somewhat overlooked. Much new evidence is becoming available, especially of this later phase, along with new and interesting problems, and significant debates on agency.

 Foodways in Roman London: investigating patterns in botanical and animal bone evidence across the city
Katie Miller – Royal Holloway

Food was central to the economic and social structures of Roman life and helped to shape personal identities and experiences. Londinium is the largest Roman urban settlement in Britain and amongst the best excavated, making it ideal for a high-resolution multi-disciplinary analysis of foodways. Previous work has shown that Roman London’s foodways exhibit several noteworthy features, some of which are quite unusual within the province of Britannia. These include exceptional access to imported foodstuffs, above average consumption of pig and significant evidence for differentiated styles of dining. These traits reflect Londinium’s character as a high status Roman urban centre with a busy port and its strong connections to patterns of diet and dining found elsewhere in the Empire.  Focussing on the city’s rich archaeobotanical and faunal assemblages, this paper will go further to examine evidence for differing foodways within the city and show that urban diets and experiences of food varied substantially. This approach allows us to move beyond settlement hierarchies and to begin to embed food into specific stratigraphic and social contexts. I will explore some ways in which exploring diet at an intra-urban scale can add to, or change, our understanding of foodways and identities in Roman London.

 Glevum: new approaches to the study of Roman Gloucester
Andrew Pearson – Cotswold Archaeology

Of the major Roman towns in South-west England, two fell within the territory of the Dobunni, Corinium Dobunnorum (Cirencester) and Colonia Nerviana Glevum (Gloucester). Both had first-century military origins, developing in the second century into fully-fledged urban centres. Both too were the subject of antiquarian and earlier to mid 20th-century archaeological investigations, those at Cirencester being the more extensive – though in each case mainly limited to keyhole observations within the modern urban footprint. Since the 1980s, however, the costs of archaeology have largely discouraged development within Cirencester, such that knowledge has not progressed greatly. The same held true for Gloucester, although urban renewal schemes are now generating new data albeit often on a small scale. Therefore, with this the immediate future, how can we take our knowledge forward? Glevum offers approaches which could be adopted. These include the application of science to new sites, whereas most substantive excavation in Gloucester between the 1960s and 80s applied little or none. Mining data from past assemblages – both artefactual and osteological – has also been undertaken; this has produced information that informs about Glevum in isolation, but also creates opportunities for comparison and contrast with other Romano-British urban centres. This paper explores these approaches, and discusses how they are modifying our understanding of Glevum.

 Londinium at the London Museum: creating content for a new museum
Rebecca Redfern – Museum of London        
Meriel Jeater – Museum of London

The creation of a new museum at Smithfield market gives us the opportunity to update and share knowledge about Roman London with our visitors, through dedicated gallery displays and a focused space about life in a shop and house. Approaches to design, display and content differs between these two areas, but both give space to recently discovered objects to tell new stories about the settlement, and for multi-disciplinary evidence about the people to be shared through a variety of content and media. The opportunity to bring Roman London up-to-date for our visitors, also enabled us to critically examine, with the support of colleagues across education, contract archaeology and academia, display priorities and to help us give greater visibility to previously underplayed stories. New finds and revised interpretations of existing datasets and objects, have enabled us to deliver the ‘traditional’ key areas necessary to supporting the national curriculum – faith, the military and trade. By telling the story of Londinium anew, we have been able to give space to nuanced and empathetic insights and portrayals of enslavement, the lives of racialized minorities and those most harmed by the social and economic inequalities which shaped the Roman world.

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