Religious place and its interaction with urbanization in the Roman era

Abstract

This article examines the issue of urbanization in Roman Britain and its interaction with places of the late pre-Roman Iron Age. Many of these places were complex and highly meaning-laden landscapes and often incorporated ritually imbued watery locations as well as culturally significant activities. The modern western conception of place differs vastly from the past when places were important ways of conceptualizing, experiencing and understanding the world and they were constructed through human action, memory and experience and interaction. `Landscape' is largely a modern term and may be inadequate for attempting to understand place and space in the past. The location of Roman towns in Britain has often been considered predominantly in strategic, economic and practical terms but they will also have been interacting with pre-Roman places, which in turn may have gone on to influence the nature of urbanism itself.