Continuity on the Cotswolds: some problems of ownership, settlement and hedge survey between Roman Britain and the Middle Ages (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cotswolds: Problems of Roman Rural Settlement
The Cotswolds, in western central Britain, form an area of agricultural production but the balance between different forms of farming have changed over the centuries. The changes in the Roman period can be investigated, and those changes may help understanding of Roman rural archaeology on other areas
The transition from Roman Britain to medieval England and Wales clearly saw profound changes in society and landscape, with the large-scale abandonment of the settlements most closely associated with Romanitasvillas and towns -and the emergence of new architectural styles, burial rites, and other material culture of Germanic character. These changes in the archaeological record suggest profound social dislocation for the higher echelons of society, but have deflected attention away from what may have been a very different story for the majority of the rural population. This article offers a preliminary description of the results of the Fields of Britannia Project, which is examining the potential for continuity and discontinuity in agricultural landscapes across the different regions of Roman Britain. Three strands are explored: the palaeoenvironmental sequences that record how patterns of land use changed over time, the relationship between excavated Romano-British field systems and those of the medieval period, and the ways in which settlement patterns evolved. All three point to considerable potential continuity and a lack of evidence for large-scale post-Roman abandonment of the rural countryside in lowland areas.
Post-Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England
1996
This thesis is the result of a decision to extend the approach used by me when examining Irish burial practices, to a review of the archaeological and documentary record for burial practices and associated phenomena in the transitional period from late/post-Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. The study considers burial rites; the method of disposal of physical remains, the position and orientation of bodies, and burial structures and enclosures: grave-goods are only referred to when they are pertinent to a particular line of argument. My intention is to draw together the various aspects of burial of the Iron Age, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon periods in order to look at the overall picture. Occasionally this may mean stating the obvious, but by noting and plotting distributions of various burial traits first in the Iron Age and Romano-British periods, and then comparing these traits with the Anglo-Saxon period some revealing results can be obtained. It was important to begin wi...
1999
This edited collection of papers studies the rural hinterland of the Roman forts and towns of North West England. The volume is in three sections. The first two deal with some theoretical approaches to settlement and the problems of site location and identification within the region. The final part contains four case studies looking at the two most-studied Iron Age and Romano-British enclosures in the region: Great Woolden Hall and Irby, and then the Castleshaw Valley, where research has revealed the tight economic control of the upland landscape of the southern pennies during the Roman period.
Beyond Walls: Reassessing Iron Age and Roman Encounters in Northern Britain
Antiquity
Northern Britain is one of a few areas in Western Europe over which the Roman Empire did not establish full control. In order to reassess the impact of Rome in this northernmost frontier, the new Leverhulme-funded project Beyond Walls is analysing the long-term transformation of settlement patterns in an area extending from south of Hadrian's Wall to north of the Antonine Wall. The results of a pilot study around Burnswark hillfort demonstrate the potential of such a landscape-based approach.