Conclusions

Abstract

Territorial structures feature in many studies of the past, but are the focus of very few. While books on Iron Age Britain are full of references to ‘tribes’ and ‘kingdoms’, their boundaries remain poorly defined. Although regional variation within Iron Age material culture was marked, it has traditionally been thought that Romanization led to a homogenization of society, its artefacts, and its architecture. Our understanding of Romano-British territorial identities remains poor and most studies have simply provided the seemingly obligatory map showing the names of civitates with or without schematic dotted lines between them. Within early medieval scholarship there has been a greater focus on territoriality and in particular the origins and development of kingdoms, but few attempts have been made to map their boundaries or the socioeconomic zones that may have underpinned them. Overall, our understanding of territorial structures in Britain during the late prehistoric and early historic periods is very poor. Until the 1960s—when the ‘culture-historical’ paradigm prevailed—the Iron Age, Roman, and early medieval periods were seen as having been characterized by frequent disruptions to society brought about by invasions and migrations. From the 1970s the idea that there may have been far greater continuity in the landscape gained favour, just as the idea that cultural change had to be brought about by mass migration went out of fashion. Most of the narratives on what happened in the post-Roman landscape were, however, based upon anecdotal evidence from a small number of well-known sites—Barnsley Park, Frocester, Latimer, Rivenhall, and the like—and so The Fields of Britannia (Rippon et al. 2015) attempted to explore the extent to which there may have been continuity within the countryside through an analysis of pollen sequences and excavated field systems. This suggested a considerable degree of potential continuity in most lowland regions, making a prima facie case that many Romano-British farmers continued to work the land, albeit with a shift in emphasis from arable to pasture. Following on from this, Kingdom, Civitas, and County has considered whether there may also have been continuity in the socio-economic and territorial structures within which communities lived their lives.