Gresham College Lectures

Landscapes of Roman Britain

March 17, 2023 Gresham College
Gresham College Lectures
Landscapes of Roman Britain
Show Notes Transcript

We used to think Roman Britain was a largely untamed natural landscape of woodland with occasional opulent villas representing the houses of an alien elite, set side by side with scattered peasant settlements. Archaeological work since the 1940s has radically altered this understanding through a combination of large-scale excavation and a revolution in remote sensing techniques, revealing a more varied picture of housing, farming, settlement and industry.

This lecture will explore our current knowledge of the nature of Roman imperialism and the history of Britain.


A lecture by Martin Millett recorded on 15 March 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/roman-landscapes

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(title swooshing)- What I want to talk to you about is the landscape of Roman Britain in the sense of the countryside, and it's my proposition that I want to explore with you that since the 1990s, really, there's been a revolution in our knowledge of the countryside in Roman Britain. Roman Britain's always been fascinating for many people, and glad to see that it continues to fascinate an audience this evening. And part of that fascination is I think its perceived familiarity between us and the Roman world. So when we see things like the Orpheus mosaic here from near Cirencester, we can relate to it through our own cultural knowledge and understanding. But what I want to do this evening is to argue for you that the revolution in our understanding of the countryside in Roman Britain is not just a revolution as we'll see in the amount of evidence that we've got, but this is leading to new ideas and new ways of understanding cultural change in Britain 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. Now, I don't want to presume with an intelligent audience like you what your presumptions are about Roman Britain and the Romans, but I would suggest that it's commonly held that if you take images of Roman Britain, people think about the Romans as people coming from the Mediterranean and settling in these islands, that when we think about the countryside, we tend to think about those people coming in and settling in big country houses. And I've got Fishbourne in Sussex on the screen here to illustrate that. And we think of those country houses very much as being familiar, like, for instance, 18th-century country houses, the sort of places that you visit with the National Trust. And alongside those big palatial villa establishments, there is also a common understanding, actually a wrong understanding, that the density of settlement across Roman Britain was relatively low, and that the landscape, particularly in the lowlands, continued to be dominated by uncleared woodland with small parcels of exploited land. Those, I would suggest, are common conceptions about the landscape of Roman Britain which have been changed, as we'll see in a moment, by recent archeological work on a large scale. And to illustrate the way that that change has taken place, I start with a slide of actually the part of Cambridge where I live. I live just down here on Huntington Road. Those of you who are familiar with Cambridge, Castle Hill's down here, Magdalene College and the city center down there. As we head out on the Huntington Road, which is the Roman Road from Cambridge up towards Godmanchester and the Roman North, we've had large scale development in recent years, and what that shows is that we have a densely populated landscape. You can't see the blobs on here in detail, but each of these blobs is a settlement of the Roman period. So we're not talking about vast tracts of exploited landscape. Virtually everywhere that has been examined in recent years in lowland Britain has very high densities of sites. You can't walk more than 500 or 1,000 meters across the landscape of lowland Roman Britain without being on top of a Roman settlement site. Furthermore, the nature of the archeology that has been exposed in the recent past is dominated by small farms. There is one villa in this area down by the park and ride site on Madingley Road, if any of you are Cambridge people, but the rest of the settlements are small farms connected by trackways and with areas of field systems in between. And as I say, that's not just the pattern in central or the edge of central Cambridge. It's a pattern that is replicated across the whole of lowland Britain, and large scale infrastructure projects, the building of HS2, the upgrading of the A14, and currently the A428 in eastern England are replicating this pattern. This week, I've been reading the reports on the work on the A14 that was completed during the COVID pandemic, and there are literally a dozen of these sites that have been discovered in the road works. So we are now seeing a densely occupied landscape and one that is highly diverse in land use, and just before I explore some aspects of that, I think it's worth pausing to think how that knowledge has come about. The first, in a sense, revolution in our knowledge of the density of landscape use comes in the early to mid-20th century with the development of archeological aerial photography first developed really by pilots involved in the First World War, and subsequently, RAF pilots in the Second World War who recognized that as they flew over the landscape, they could see the past features shown in the crops. And what we're seeing here is just a sample of a landscape in eastern Yorkshire where the differential ripening of the crop is showing buried field boundaries, settlement features, pits, and so forth. Now that's something we've known for a very long time, for the best part of a hundred years, but there's been a revolution in collecting this information both through different forms of aerial photography now with drones and so forth and satellite images, but also as mechanized agriculture is gradually eating into the buried landscape and climate change is enhancing periods of drought, which is when these features first show. The other very traditional way of gathering this information is simply walking across the landscape. If you walk across plowed fields where there are buried sites, generally speaking, artifacts from the sites come onto the surface, and the traditional way of doing this is to use amateur archeologists or students to sort of mass walk the landscape and map what is there. Highly exploitative but also highly effective. I've already mentioned development archeology, and in this sense, changes in the way that archeological work in advance of development takes place in this country, which happened in 1990, have meant that there is a lot more development-led archeology now done than there was 40 or 50 years ago. And in essence, if you are building a new housing estate or building a road, you have to assess whether there is archeology there and the developer then, if there is archeology that's said to be significant, then pays for an excavation. So we get large-scale stripping of landscape and their exploration. This is the Northwest Cambridge development, the Cambridge University project dealt with by my colleagues in Cambridge Archeological Unit, where the area that is being built onto the northwest of Cambridge has been essentially completely stripped. Large acreages of landscape explored through excavation, which have just produced massive amounts information. And the other development that has taken place largely as a result of development pressure and also the development of technology is the use of ground-based geophysical survey to map landscapes. Again, it's technology that has been around for quite a long time, but has now been mechanized and computer imagery or processing has enabled us to use this on a much larger scale. The driver for this has been very much development-led archeology where if you're going to build a road or a housing estate or a pipeline, you really want to gather the information on what might be there at a very early stage, and the most common method of doing this is to use gradiometers, instruments that measure tiny variations in the earth's magnetic field. And as with the aerial photographs, that enables you to see what's buried beneath the surface. This is one of our PhD students doing this across an agricultural landscape in eastern Yorkshire, and you can see the sort of scale upon which she can work. And pioneering work in this area has been done by my friend and colleague Dominic Powlesland on the edges of the Vale of Pickering in eastern Yorkshire, where the gray represents the areas that have been surveyed. The dark features are buried archeological features. So what we're seeing here is a trackway running across the landscape with settlement beside it, elements of the natural landscape with field systems and geological features and settlements running all the way along here. And the remarkable thing about this is where we've had this type of archeological work done in the past, over the last few years, virtually all the areas that we have surveyed or have been looked at have revealed high densities of settlement. So this isn't just where Dominic decided to do work because there was archeology there. This is tens of hectares where we're seeing the whole landscape and we're seeing the different phases of the landscape. So the trick with this is not just identifying where the settlements are, and what's geology and so forth, but trying to unpick it to see the different phases of development. And this has really transformed the understanding of ancient landscapes, landscape of Roman Britain in particular, moving us away from an idea of isolated people in isolated parts of the landscape, but seeing it as a unified whole, a total landscape. And the key with that is thinking what the implications are. And if we just pause for a moment, if we think about the social implications of a totally occupied landscape, we're not talking about people as, for instance, living in the outback in Australia, where you have to go for miles and miles and miles for social interaction with your neighbors. You're talking about a society where you can metaphorically go and borrow a pint of milk from next door, if it's a five-minute walk, and that changes the way we think about social interactions and social change in quite fundamental ways. And with this recent boom in landscape archeology, we have also seen some fantastic academic work in drawing evidence together, and there have been a number of projects. The two really big projects that I draw your attention to and encourage you to go and look at are the 2007 work on the Atlas of Roman Rural Settlement in England by Jeremy Taylor, which drew together evidence from air photography, from field walking, and from development to try and get an overall picture of what was going on and explore regional variation in that, and the more recent Rural Settlement of Roman Britain Project published in three volumes. It's a project led by Mike Fulford from Redding University and Neil Holbrook from Cotswold Archeology, and they've produced three bumper volumes that seek to give a general understanding of the nature of settlement and landscape across the province. Importantly, that Roman Rural Settlement Project is based very much on excavated sites, particularly sites that have been excavated as a result of development pressures, and as a result, it has some inherent biases towards areas where development has been most intensive. So my own home area around Cambridge figures very largely because of the economic boom in that area, the extent of development. The area that I'm going to spend most of the lecture talking about this evening in rural Yorkshire has had less development in it, so the evidence from development-led excavations is much less. But just pause for a moment. Their work that the Roman Rural Settlement Project dealt with, they processed the evidence from 2,627 excavations. The project data finished about eight years ago, so there are many more excavations since then. That's a complete change from work even around 1990 when I wrote "A Synthesis of Roman Britain." And what the Rural Settlement Project was able to demonstrate is that there is immense regional diversity in the nature of the landscape, the nature of settlement, and so forth. Not withstanding that regional diversity, there is a dominance of small farm sites. So the idea that the landscape is dominated by big sort of villas has completely gone. Something less than one in a hundred sites are stone, elaborate stone houses, villas. Most of them are small farmstead sites. They regionally vary, but most of them are enclosed by ditches, dykes, and so forth, and some of them are dispersed across the landscape, others are more nucleated, and there is differentiation within them. So they're not all the same. Differentiation between very complex sort of farms where there are clearly lots of families gathered together in one place, and in other areas, dominance by single family farmsteads. And the other factor that has I think changed very considerably is that alongside those farming sites, there is increasing evidence for nucleated settlements. I hesitate to use the word village, but you get the general idea of people living together, not at one farm, but in communities, who are presumably engaged in agriculture as well as sort of small-scale trading and so forth. Very often these nucleated settlements are running along trackways and roads. So a landscape which, far from being the sort of wooded landscape with occasional big houses in it, it's not only totally occupied, but is totally occupied by diversity of settlement, settlement that is much more reminiscent, I think, of what we expect of medieval settlement than what we traditionally thought of as Roman settlement. The other thing that comes out of these broad syntheses is an understanding of the size of the population of Roman Britain. And the Roman Rural Settlement Project suggests that the peak of numbers of people living in Roman Britain was in the second century AD, when there were about 2 million people in the countryside, on their estimates. I'm afraid I veer further than they do. Some years ago, I suggested that population was in the region of 3.5 to 4 million, and I put the peak later. I think they're probably right that the peak is earlier, but I would suggest that the population of Roman Britain was probably nearer the 4 million mark than the 2 million mark. And that puts it in the sort of area that we don't return to in the landscape of England of Wales until the time around Domesday and a little bit after. The other thing that's important for this large-scale work that is sort of giving us a general understanding of what's going on is that the balance between different sectors of the population is now fairly firmly understood. And again, going back to sort of traditional ideas, we tended to think about the Roman army as being a major feature of the population of Britain, the towns as being a major feature of the population. It's now pretty clear that this is largely an agrarian society. Probably something over 90% of the population lived in the countryside. Only something like 3.5% of the population are accounted for by soldiers and people on the frontier, and the other 6% or so are sort of urban dwellers, both in big cities like Roman Londinium and down to the much smaller urban sites that are dotted around the countryside and acted as the administrative foci for Roman Britain. Now the trend of those synthetic studies has been very much to make broad, general statements looking at regional variation, population size, the nature of production and the economy. What I think it also does is provide us with windows into past lives and ways in which we can change our understanding of different aspects of the countryside. And I want to use the second part of this lecture, not to make broad general statements about the landscape of Roman Britain, but to focus largely on field work with which I've been engaged, mostly in North and East Yorkshire, to explore how this revolution in knowledge is changing the way that we think about individuals' lives and social change. And so I said in the introduction, my prime interest in many ways is in thinking about how societies change and how culture changes under the influence of Roman power. And I want to do this by looking first at how we understand one particular villa landscape. I then want to look at some elements of rural diversity in landscapes in the Yorkshire area, and then come to think about networking and how people related to one another through the landscape. And I'm going to return to the villa as a concept as my first case study, focusing on thinking about what villas mean, what they represent. And again, if we go back to the sort of understandings that were common when I was being taught Roman Britain at the University of London in the 1970s, we have a general view that the Roman Empire generated economic growth, that the arrival of a monetary economy enabled people to engage in profit-making agriculture and the profit-making agriculture led to aspirations towards expressing identity through becoming as Roman as possible, what we used to call romanization. And the general assumption was that if you acquired wealth in Roman Britain, what you would naturally do in the countryside is to try and emulate the Roman way of doing things by building a villa to live in, and this was based on an underlying assumption that the culture represented by the Mediterranean was superior to that of the indigenous populations of Britain. Today we would question a lot of those assumptions about the natural choice and superior culture, and emphasize, I think, that the building of villas was something that was a matter of cultural choice. Whatever we think about why people chose that, what has become clear over the last 40 or 50 years is that most of the villas that we see in Britain are a result of an evolution of the sites through time, moving from Iron Age-style landscapes dominated by roundhouses, usually in enclosed settlements, through building in timber, and then in stone, and the stone buildings gradually growing as the estate becomes more wealthy and more profitable. That's important, and it's important to bear in mind that wherever else we're going with this discussion, that the underlying pattern that is repeated time and time again is that there is a very strong element of continuity of settlement locations in Britain. There is churn, there is change. Some sites die out and others are newly replaced, but there is no evidence whatsoever for any complete landscape change as a result of Roman annexation, Roman power. But if we want to understand that process beyond the, if you like, the place where the people lived at the center of the villa, we need to think further about this, and I want to use as an example here a very wonderful site up on the Yorkshire Wolds at Rudston, and if you haven't seen the Rudston mosaics, do go to Hull Museum and look at them. They're some of the finest sets of mosaics from Roman Britain. I've got here from Ian Stead's excavations in the 1960s an image of the mosaic with the charioteer at the center and the seasons in the corners. Wonderful examples of the art of mosaic in late Roman Britain, and David Neal and Steven Cosh's placing of some of the other mosaics within the buildings. These are the sorts of things we see with rooms probably used for dining, for entertaining, and bathing suite. People in this settlement taking on Roman ways of doing things, Roman ways of dining, Roman ways of bathing, and Roman styles of decoration. But the excavations at Rudston in the 1930s and then in the 1960s focused simply on the buildings, the mosaics, and so forth. If we are able to pan out from the villa excavation there, in the 1990s, Cathy Stoertz and the Royal Commission of Historical Monuments used the then-available air photographic evidence to map the landscape. Now, you won't be able to see the detail of this on here. I'll come to a closer view in a moment. And what we're able to see from that is that the pre-Roman landscape in this part of eastern Yorkshire is dominated by very large property boundaries represented by enormous earthworks, the so-called Yorkshire Dykes, which divide the landscape into blocks, and settlement is largely, in the pre-Roman period, focused along those boundaries, leaving the areas in between as large open fields. And I think it's reasonable to conclude that those large open fields were ranges for stock, probably sheep, where you could keep them enclosed, but in a communal area, and you lived to one side of it. But what we've been able to do by using further, more recent air photographic survey and geophysical survey, largely the work here of our PhD students, Eleanor Maw, is to map what's going on in the vicinity of the villa here, and what we see is that the large range for running sheep on is at some stage divided into small fields, that one block of landscape is completely divided up into fields. Now that looks like it's a pattern of privatization of the land. The communal sheep run is being divided up into field systems. And by placing the 1960s excavation in the context of the geophysical survey and using the evidence from the excavation, we can unpick the story of what's going on here. I have to say that our initial expectation was that we would see the villa related to the dividing up of the landscape. So big landowner in the landscape and builds a villa, sort of privatizing the land and moving from a communal way of doing things in the Iron Age to a Roman way of doing things with private property in the early Roman period. When you push it all together, what we discover is it's a more complicated story. Yes, the landscape is divided up, but it's not divided up at the time of the Roman conquest. It's divided up three or four generations later. So it's not the Romans arrive, the landscape's divided up, someone takes it over. It's a more gradual process. And secondly, it's clear that the division of the landscape takes place the best part of 100 years before the villa is constructed. So this is not a question of gradual accumulation of wealth. It's question, as I would see it, as a series of cultural decisions by the people who are living here, not only how to divide the landscape up and use it for farming and so forth, but the way that they want to express their identity, the way they want to live. And it's a long period of a multi-generational change, rather than one of a simple sort of the Romans arrive and things change. What I would also emphasize here is that what we see in that mosaic and the ways of living are a series of very deliberate cultural choices, that it's not simply a question of emulating things coming from outside. It's reinterpreting them in a contemporary way. And the second example that I want to take with you is to look at the density and diversity of landscape and how it changes in an area of lowland East Yorkshire in the area between Hull and York. The site is a place called Hayton, the A1079 running from Hull to York diagonally across the screen here. And as in the instance of the Cambridge area that we looked at before, through archeological work, largely in this case, aerial photography and geophysics, we've been able to map the density of settlements, and each one of these rings represents a farm site in this landscape. Again, incredibly densely occupied, but in this landscape the settlements are largely focused on a stream that is running through the landscape down here, and the settlements are on the gravel beside the stream with the heavier land to either side being set-aside field. So we can see, if you like, the economic geography of the landscape in this. And here we see transformation around about AD 70, lasting for 10 or 15 years. The Roman army arrive, about 500 soldiers are based here. The soldiers have a fort. The fort is to one side of the existing farmstead, but it looks as though from the detail of the aerial photography that people gathered around the fort. There is a large roundhouse just outside the fort. So people are cozying up, if you like, to the Roman army. When the fort moves on with Roman military deployments elsewhere, very soon after, the Roman road is laid out, running straight through the landscape here, forming, and we'll come back to this in a moment, something of a crossroads with the traditional routeway along the valley, and you get a shift of populations beginning to form one of these nucleated village sites along the side of the road here on one side of the river. Within the landscape itself, the farmsteads have quite different histories. We haven't excavated all of them, but we've collected material from several of them. The one we've excavated over here shows a transition towards what you might describe as a sort of small villa. It has a bathhouse, it has stone buildings and so forth, and engages with the Roman economy. Others of them seem to have kept their distance. Some of them die out, but others of them also develop into more elaborate types of Roman style buildings. So we see cultural change, but it's an evolution, and it's an evolution that is largely promoted, I think, by the development of the road network and connections to outside, rather than the traditional view that the military changed things. If we pan out a little bit further in this same landscape, the Hayden study area was up here. Few years before that, we did work down in the Holme on Spalding Moor area, just a few miles to the south. The Roman road running from Bath runs up through here, and what this map shows is the known distribution partly from pot and antiquity scheme data of Roman coins through the landscape, and the coins act as a sort of measure for the distribution of sites and interaction with the Roman economy. And what's remarkable is that the Hayden area and the areas along the road have high levels of interaction, whereas the Holme on Spalding Moor area, although it's not deserted, has very little interaction at the level of the coin-using economy. But at the same time, that area is densely occupied by settlement sites, settlement sites represented by enclosures and so forth. There's a lack of field systems here, but what we seem to have is an economy that is very specialized. In the Late Iron Age, this is an area where they produced iron. In the Roman period, the iron deposits from the bog ore in the valley, lowland valley system seems to be worked out, and they moved to producing pottery. So we've got a pottery kiln, one of whole number here. That pottery is being distributed across the whole of Northern England, but if you like, the economic benefit from it, as far as we can see, is not flowing back into that local area. It's presumably going somewhere else, and that suggests that we're able to distinguish different lifeways, and what I would suggest that we're seeing in the Holme area is a landscape that is dominated by woodland management, charcoal production, the use of wood for potting and so forth. Very different from the agricultural landscapes up here and arguably under the control of someone who's living elsewhere. So the money is not flowing back into that landscape. So what that illustrates for us is, if you like, a diversity of different approaches that are taking place, even very locally within Roman Britain. And can we use that sort of evidence for understanding how culture develops and the connections between different parts of the landscape? What I would suggest is that we can, and if we go back to the Hayden area, we're looking here up the valley into the Yorkshire Wolds. The area we've been looking at just now is just down bottom here, and just on the bottom edge of the screen is where we dug the Burnby Lane site, the site that has the bathhouse and a small sort of villa type settlement. What we think is happening here is that there is a traditional routeway, if you like, for driving stock from summer pasture up on the top of the wolds, those large sort of ranges we were looking at earlier and we'll return to in a moment, down to the lowlands for sort of lambing and presumably for sale into the Roman economy, and that routeway is one of the networks that we can trace through the archeology. It looks like it's a predominantly sheep rearing economy. And interestingly, alongside those quite Roman style ways of living in the Burnby Lane site we excavated, there are also a large number of deposits of feasting debris from sheep, not just discarded. This example here is one of my favorites, where they've had a feast. They have buried three young sheeps' heads with the forelimbs of the sheep, just underneath the nose, and they've then filled the pit with clay. So what we're seeing is something that's quite difficult to imagine what's going on, but it's very deliberate, and it seems to have sort of religious and cultural connotations, so the sheep are not only important economically, they're also important sort of symbolically and arguably in religious terms. And if we follow that routeway down to the Roman road, the settlement we were talking about was this one. There's an area next to the Roman road where there is no evidence for settlement. It's completely empty. We've done geophysics on it, there's nothing showing the air photographs, but there are very large numbers of metal objects that have been found there, and the way that we interpret this is that being connected up to the wolds, when you bring your sheep down seasonally to market, you're probably gathering with people from elsewhere, and there's probably something, a seasonal fair, a seasonal marketplace taking place in the fields beside the Roman road where the sheep can be sold on to the traders who are using the road system. That brings in all kinds of other stuff that gets sort of lost in the fields in the fair. And I always think of Thomas Hardy's sort of seasonal fair at Weyhill, in this time, that although there's absolutely nothing in the field, you can imagine that for a few days, perhaps in the late summer or early autumn, everyone comes in, and that becomes a sort of focus for people within the landscape. And at the other end of that route up on the wolds itself, on one of these settlements that seems to be focused on the edges of a large sort of range for running sheep, we have the deposition of bullion coins of different periods. They're not a hoard. They are individual coins that are buried within the landscape, which I would suggest represent the wealth going back up into these upland areas. But in these upland areas, they're not being used in the Roman way. They're being used as sort of something that we don't quite know what to do with. So they're being buried, and probably being buried as a matter of choice, again in what appears to be a quasi-religious way. So these people are networked with the lowlands but they're behaving in a way that isn't, if you like, Roman. It is more related to their indigenous choices, indigenous cultures. And not very far away from that site, literally half a mile away, we had excavated another part of that boundary settlement, where we found another sort of what you might call a cultural hybrid. It's a hall-type building, it's not a Roman villa if you like, but it's using Roman building methods, the central workhall, a couple of private areas within it, a communal type building rather than the sorts of things that we see nearby in the Rudston villa, of private spaces and so forth. Now this is an interesting hybrid, because it reflects communal living as was in existence in the area in the Iron Age, and written in stone, if you like, and written in stone in a very visible part of the landscape. But it's not either a Roman or an indigenous style. It's a hybrid which is hybrid of choice. And I would also draw attention to the fact that these types of big hall buildings are actually very common within Roman Britain. They are one of the most common forms of building. Very often we don't have good evidence for them, as at a site in Surrey here, where we have very good evidence for the survival, and this is a reconstruction of one of the sites we dug in East Yorkshire. And the point I would want to make here is that this is timber architecture being used for high status display, massive buildings, communal buildings that were important for the people living in them, but which represents something that is a creation of the Roman provinces, Roman Britain, rather than the Mediterranean ideas coming in. And I would further emphasize these are habitation buildings. There's a lovely press release recently from the newly-discovered Roman site in the East Midlands, where Historic England talked about one of these structures having a bath put in it, and it was the earliest British barn conversion, and I'd almost exploded with sort of fury because these things aren't barns. These are great halls, and what we're seeing in the example that recently come up in the East Midlands is the elaboration and the combination of a Roman way of bathing with a very important British way of showing your status.'Cause these buildings are using huge trees. They're massive. They're like the scale of medieval tithe barns. So they're big high status things which represent a way that these people were showing to their neighbors and other people passing by their choices in the way that they wished to live. Now, in this evening's talk, I have quite deliberately focused on bits of the culture of Roman Britain that are arguably less classical and more diverse than you had probably expected. I do want to finish by emphasizing that that's not the whole period of Roman Britain. There were people in Roman Britain who chose to do things in a very classical Mediterranean way. And I used, thanks to the Boxford History Project, the remarkable mosaic found four or five years ago, this site in Wilshire, which is telling the story of classical mythology in the mosaic. And what this stands for is the fact that there were people in Roman Britain who chose to adopt Mediterranean ways, and when they did it, they did it as well as anyone else in Western Europe. But for me, what I hope I've shown you is that there are other aspects of Roman Britain which are showing different cultural choices of Roman Britain, which is perhaps less Roman and less familiar than you had expected. And that's my main message for you, that if we quote LP Hartley, "The Go-Between,""The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." I hope you've seen something of those differences this evening. Thank you very much.(audience applauding)- Professor Millett, thank you very much. Lots of fun ideas to discuss. Got a lot of questions online for you, so I'll start with a couple here and then I'll open it up to the floor with my colleague who has a roaming mic for you. So first question for you. In Northumberland, there are suggestions that modern parish boundaries in the rural areas may have Iron Age origins. Do the sites that you mentioned support that idea?- That's a very complicated and very difficult question.- Good start.- There is some evidence that there are continuations of boundaries, but those are largely in areas where the landscape is very constrained. So if you have a constrained upland valley, then the boundary that you had in the Iron Age is probably going to be the same one as we've got today. That's not necessarily the same as meaning that there has been a direct continuity, and for the most part, the evidence of discontinuities over long periods of time is stronger than the evidence of continuity. But in the upland areas, and upland Northumberland is one, you can see why there might be those.- I've got another one. Is it compulsory for developers to disclose that there is archeological importance where they plan to develop in the sites that they plan to develop?- It is effectively compulsory in the sense that if you apply for planning permission to do a housing development, the planning authority will want to see the evidence of whether there or not there is archeology there, and their planning advisors will monitor the quality of the work. So it's not... I doubt that anyone would really want to get round it, but if they did, there are mechanisms to to police that, if I can put it that way.- Do we have any questions in the room? Thank you. Just got a mic for you.- [Mark] Yes, Mark Willingdale. From your view of the population and the landscape, would you say therefore that the image of the landscape is more one of cleared fields without hedgerows and things, it's quite clear patchy landscape, and then blocks of woodlands on the hills?- Yeah.- [Mark] So it's much more open than one would imagine really.- I would largely agree with that. I think that hedgerows were probably important. The site at Shiptonthorpe that I just touched on, we had a water hole, and in the bottom of the water hole, we had hedge clippings. Now, you don't very often find that and a hedge doesn't show very well in air photographic evidence. You got the ditch but not the bank and the hedge. So yes, my image of Roman Britain is largely small fields for arable and pasture, but with ditch boundaries, but a lot of them with hawthorn hedges and so forth on them.- [Audience Member 1] Thank you for your talk. I was interested in what you said about the individual coins that were found.- Yeah.- [Audience Member 1] I was wondering why you thought that there might be some religious aspect to that, rather than, for example, they just got dropped there.- Yeah. On most of these sites, you get low value coins, bronze coins, and they're the money that drops out of people's pockets. And those are generally found in the occupied areas. The image that I sort of passed over quite quickly there showed that these are all silver coins of various dates. So it's not a hoard, and they are buried, not within the settlement itself, but on the edges of the fields roundabout, and there's a lot of evidence accumulating that people were, for reasons that we don't fully understand quite deliberately going out and burying things. So at the building with the hall that we excavated, just out of the back there, there was a nice broach, complete courtyard, nothing in it, just a little hole and a broach put in the ground. And what my reading of this is that what's going on is that these things are important, they're coming in, but people didn't really know quite how to relate to them, so they are putting them outside where they live, not inside where they live, and I see that as probably having some sort of religious focus to it, but it's highly controversial. You could feel free to differ.- [Audience Member 2] Oh, hi. Thanks for a very, very interesting talk. You've used the word settlements a lot. Does that just mean single house, or is it a fairly elastic term? Can it mean groups of houses? And if we get into, say, third century, a couple of hundred years after the actual military conquest, who's living in them? Is it the descendants or the people who are living in Britain at the time of the Roman conquest? Is it possibly descendants of soldiers? Is there like a colonization in that sense?- There's very little evidence for colonization. There are odd sites where you can say that might be someone coming in from outside, but for the most part, these are the descendants of the people who'd lived in the country at the time of invasion. The first part of your question was, sorry.- [Audience Member 2] When you say settlements...- Oh, oh yeah. Well, I'm using it in a portmanteau sense. Some of them are isolated individual family farms. Some of them seem to be what you see in the West Country, Middle Ages, you know, clusters of farms, and some of them are these sort of more nucleated settlements where they're presumably not kin related but they're people just juxtaposed in living, and one of the things that's come out from this massive archeological evidence is it's highly varied. So different areas of the country, different patterns, and locally, as you could see in the example I was giving, differences just in a neighborhood.- I'll just take one from online again. This relates to the Gallo-Roman coin hoard that was found in Jersey in 2012. This person asks, what do you make of this find, and how do you think it changed the understanding of Roman Britain?- Coin hoards are very complicated. Some of them are clearly people's savings being hidden for safekeeping. Some of them may be related to what we were talking about with individual coins, that where there is a religious aspect to it. That huge hoard has been incredibly important for understanding the production of those coinages and so forth. I'm not sure, 'cause I don't know the detail of the find spot, where I would place it on the there for safekeeping, there for religious purposes.- [Audience Member 3] Thank you.- [Audience Member 4] I'm fascinated by the division of the land at Rudston. Are we looking at people who previously had a communal field where they kept their sheep? Are they then going over to agricultural production, I mean, agrarian stuff? And if so, what relationship do you think they had with the people in the big house?- We don't know, because we haven't been able to sample those fields, and that's obviously what needs to be done next. My guess from the scale of the fields and so forth is people moving over to agrarian production, and that's probably to do with the demand for wheat and so forth. My own guess is that this is annexation of communal land, and one suspects from what one has seen in other historical periods when that's taken place, that that would not be a situation that wasn't without tension, if I can put it that way. (laughs)- That is all the time we have this evening. Please join me in thanking Professor Millett again. Thanks very much.(audience applauding)