Verulamium, 1932

Abstract

EXCAVATIONS at St. Albans in 1932, of which Dr. and Mrs. R. E. Mortimer Wheeler gave an account atthe Society of Antiquaries on February 23, have again added to the impressiveness of the prehistoric site and enhanced its importance as a source of knowledge of conditions in Britain immediately before the Roman invasion. The chance discovery in 1932 of a hoard of silver coins a mile north of the Abbey in the dyke running across country from the north of St. Albans in the direction of the village of Sandridge, not only proved the existence of the dyke before the second century A.D., but also led to the determination of the true character of this remarkable work, which is 100 ft. broad, 30–40 ft. deep and some five miles long, asa British defensive work extending from the pre-Romancity at the south-west of St. Albans to prehistoric works, of which the remains are still to be seen at Wheathampstead. Excavations here in the past summer have shown this to be a prehistoric ‘city’ about a hundred acres in extent, the most remarkable of its kind in the period yet found in Britain. It would appear that this great work was constructed by the Belgic invaders of Britain, who established their headquarters at St. Albans towards the end of the first century B.C. In his account of the past year's exploration of the Roman city, Dr. Wheeler drew a gloomy picture of the social and economic depression, alleviated only bya brief and illusory recovery, which invaded Verulamium as Roman power declined, after a brilliant and perhaps too optimistic efflorescence of prosperity. In the juxtaposition of pre-Roman and Roman on an extensive scale and in the evidence of the varied fortunes of a prolonged Roman occupation, St. Albans, under continued exploration, promises to become one of the most instructive and impressive archseological sites on the fringe of the Roman Empire in the western world.