Thirty Years of Roman Britain

Abstract

Thirty years are long enough to mount a substantial programme of research. There is time for ideas to develop, to mature and to establish their place in the archaeological literature: time for both visions and revisions. The years in question are from I960 to 1989 and have been chosen because they span what seems to be a watershed in the study of Roman Britain. As the editor, Malcolm Todd, mentions in a brief introduction, in I960 we lacked a full-scale history of the Roman province; now there are several in print. The same period has seen the establishment of a successful journal concerned with Romano-British research, the creation of several specialist study groups and the publication of the Britannia Monograph series, of which this volume is the eleventh. A modest celebration is by no means out of place, and it is right that the dedicatee should be Sheppard Frere. The same thirty year period has seen two other developments which are not mentioned so directly here, although they are echoed in several of the individual contributions. In practical terms there has been the enormous expansion of fieldwork brought about by increased resources for rescue archaeology, first from central government, and more recently through developer funding. In intellectual terms, too, there have been changes, for the three decades of research recorded in this book span an extraordinary transformation in the nature of archaeological thinking, best captured in David Clarke's striking phrase, a 'loss of innocence'. As an interested bystander, I shall focus mainly on those two issues in an attempt to reflect something of the character of this book. It would be easy to fill my allotted space by considering the expansion of fieldwork since I96O, and the sometimes unexpected rewards that this has brought, but to do so would be to put the cart before the horse. Before there is any sense in spending money on excavation or survey (and field survey has yet to be given its due in Romano-British archaeology), it is essential to work out quite what it is that we want to know. Although Romanists, like other period specialists, are asked to advise on priorities for state-funded projects, there has been a feeling that choices are particularly difficult to make. To some extent that practical difficulty masks a more important problem. It was seventeen years ago that David Clarke published his reflections on the nature of archaeological research. It was to be one of his last works, and his comments on that 'loss of innocence' among archaeologists drew some extreme reactions. A point which did not escape him is that some of the sharpest retorts came from scholars working in the period between late prehistory and the early middle ages. These, he felt, might be experiencing peculiar problems because of the distinctive character of their source material. Romanists, for example, operated in Britain with the aid of only limited written sources; if those sources had really played such a central part, Haverfield's ambition of publishing all the inscriptions would surely have been achieved some time ago. Those studying the early post-Roman period, on the other hand, felt themselves bound by source material whose credentials as historical documents have been endlessly questioned and debated. To what extent has the course of Romano-British studies been influenced by these discussions of method and theory? How far are the participants at least the sample of sixteen whose work appears in this volume conscious of the very distinctive problems posed by a period which is almost historical in one sense and essentially prehistoric in another? That is where the sharpest divisions of opinion are found.