Going upmarket with the Romans

For some years now, local metal detectorist and amateur archaeologist Paul Bevan has been discovering large amounts of Iron-Age and Roman material on his land at Standish, in Gloucestershire. His searches of his field have yielded Roman brooches, pottery, mosaic tesserae, roof tiles and coins. In the summer of 2003, he even dug his own trench to investigate further. Unfortunately for him, he chose he hottest spell on record in England. He found what he thought was an Iron-Age surface, but the clay soil baked hard in the heat and he had to close the trench to protect the archaeology.

There were more than enough finds already, though, to interest Time Team in the site. First impressions, particularly the quantity of Roman building materials and other finds, pointed to the presence of a sizeable villa somewhere nearby.

In fact, no villa was found. Instead, clue by clue, the archaeologists were able to piece together a different story of how the site was used during the Iron Age and Roman era. Most likely, it involves different generations of one family farming the same land, and living through huge social change and gradually improving their lifestyle as Romanised Britain became more and more prosperous.

Time Trail

The classic histories of Britain can give the impression of a land in which everything changed with the Roman invasion. Modern histories, informed by the ever-growing wealth of archaeological evidence, now tend to emphasise a continuity between the periods before and after the Romans arrived. The period before the invasion in 43 AD is now considered to have involved much more contact with the Roman world and increasing Roman influence, especially in the south. The period afterwards is considered to have involved much more continuity with the past. For most people, making a subsistence living from farming the land, little would have changed – and what did change, changed slowly.

What is certain is that there was no clear-cut dividing line in most of the country between the Iron Age and the Roman era. Instead, as Time Team's investigation at Standish illustrates, individual families continued to farm the land as their predecessors had done for generations. They continued to live in what are thought of as the classic Iron-Age roundhouses well into the Roman era, only gradually adopting Roman products and customs (including the Roman preference for building rectilinear structures) as prosperity grew and their culture evolved.

An increasing appreciation of the continuity between life in Iron-Age Britain and what followed has led to a reassessment of the history of the period. It is now apparent that many sites that would once have been seen as solely Iron Age in character were in fact occupied continuously into the Roman period. This was likely to have been the case in most farming communities, since it was not Roman imperial policy to uproot the peoples they conquered provided that they did not actively oppose their conquest. This continuity of occupation of the land has been reflected in the findings at other Time Team digs, such as at Throckmorton, where finds ranged in date from a Bronze-Age ditch to a first-century Roman brooch; Wittenham Clumps, where a rectilinear Roman house, a cobbled Iron-Age floor and more than 300 separate rubbish pits were among the indications of continuous occupation of the site; and Green Island, Dorset, which was part of an important trading centre from the Iron Age through to the fourth century AD.

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