D Perring

The Making of Britain's First Urban Landscapes: The Case of Late Iron Age and Roman Essex

This paper presents preliminary research into the social and economic impact of early urban settlement in Britain, focusing on the case-study area of Late Iron Age to Roman Essex. Through fresh analysis of ceramic assemblages from Colchester and Heybridge, we describe hitherto unrecognised socio-cultural groupings and identities through subtle differences in the deposition of pottery in the generations before and after conquest. The concluding discussion concentrates on problems that we still have to address in describing the economic basis of early urban society in Britain.

‘Gnosticism’ in Fourth-Century Britain: the Frampton Mosaics Reconsidered

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the significance of the mosaic designs employed in Roman houses. Studies have concentrated on establishing the mythological sources of the images chosen, and on describing the social and architectural contexts within which such art was used. It has long been noted that some of the subjects preferred in fourth-century Britain suggest allegorical references to the hereafter, although it has also been observed that the ‘search for profound and coherent allegories may exaggerate the significance which the wealthy British patrons imparted to the floors of the great halls or dining-rooms of their villas’. Ling, in particular, has cautioned against reading exaggerated meanings into ambivalent images that may simply have been chosen to vaunt erudite taste.

The Archaeology of Beirut: A Report on Work in the Insula of the House of the Fountains

This insula, which lay on the western margin of the earlier Iron Age city, was uncovered during post-war reconstruction work carried out in Beirut during 1994–6. Laid out in the Hellenistic period, the insula was filled out with a series of small courtyard houses after the Roman annexation. A public portico was added along a main street in the second quarter of the second century, before a period of relative inactivity. The district was revived and rebuilt in the middle of the fourth century and was home to a series of handsome town houses in the fifth century, before being devastated by earthquake in AD 551. The site was then left derelict until the early nineteenth century. This interim report sets these findings within their broader historical and archaeological context, as well as summarizing the results of recent work on the sites ceramics and stratigraphy.

My Historic Environment

I came to archaeology by way of a childhood love of historical fiction, and most especially the legends of Greece and Rome. Early visits to archaeological sites let me touch and explore the worlds where such stories were set. With my interest in archaeology awakened, I started volunteer-digging in my early teens. I remain grateful to Martin Biddle and the Winchester Excavations Committee for accommodating my clumsy enthusiasm, and was soon hooked on the addictive combination of doing and thinking that made summer fieldwork so much more engaging than the winter classroom. My first historic environment was, therefore, a boundless landscape of adventure and discovery. It was a place where I learnt that I could be a creative protagonist in the research process: making observations and decisions rather than being passively taught. I was particularly lucky to start in the early years of rescue archaeology, when it was possible to convert this passion into a career that let me travel, and where scientific exploration and informed story-telling remained an essential part of the job description. I still see archaeology as an enormously romantic subject. I now earn a living as the manager of a field unit based within a university department. This can be a less romantic engagement. The change in job description means that now my historic environment is the subject of business practice, where I lead a team that sells research services to construction industry clients. This is a business. We tender for nearly 1,000 projects a year, winning up to 400 new commissions generating £4 million in turnover and employing over 100 professional staff, and using the growing scale of operations to develop new specialist research competencies. It would be easy to let the business of delivering archaeology become an end in itself, treating the bottom line of our accounts as the principal measure of the value of the work we do. There is an undeniable satisfaction to meeting the demands of our clients on time and on budget. But this leaves us at risk of losing sight of other, more essential, values. The fault for this lies not only with the realworld constraints of commercial practice — all too easily blamed for the things that people do not like about present directions in professional archaeology — but is the consequence of privileging the values of conservation over those of discovery. The benefits of protecting the historic environment are widely vaunted and easily argued, and establish the planning constraints that oblige property developers to employ archaeologists. I am grateful for the work opportunities that the application of the ‘polluter pays’ principle has presented, but am easily persuaded by Willem Willems’ argument that ‘preservation in situ sucks’.1 Working in development-led archaeology can feel like being presented with a vast bag of jam donuts, and told to take a small bite out of every one while avoiding any of the jam and never, ever, eating a

Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire. By Kim Bowles

This short offering in the excellent Debates in Archaeology series offers a critical re-examination of recent research into the luxurious villas and town-houses of late antiquity. Bowes argues that previous work on the subject has been overly influenced by our assumptions about the hierarchical nature of late antique society, and has failed to give adequate attention to the evidence of continuity with the earlier Roman period. The first half of this book sets out to show that literature on the subject, in particular key studies by Thèbert (1987) and Ellis (2000), depends too heavily on text-derived models, relies on a limited archaeological sample (biased towards North Africa and the eastern empire), and involves methodologically suspect attempts to identify different social functions from the evidence of house plans. Some new evidence is also introduced, in particular from Bowles’s own work at Butrint, to show that chronologies of change were more complicated than is assumed. This leads to the conclusion that the distinctions drawn between private and public in late antique houses were also evident in earlier periods. The notion that late antique patrons were somehow nastier and more socially remote can therefore be questioned. Bowles introduces corrective balance, using the architecture of luxury as evidence for social competition rather than as a sign of a rigidly stratified autocracy. She suggests that the proliferation of such houses in the fourth and fifth centuries is witness to the expansion of imperial bureaucracy following economic and social reforms under Diocletian and Constantine. This in turn makes it difficult to argue that the investment in large fourth-century villas represented a widening of the social gulf between landowners and tenants, or to use the evidence of such houses as proof of changes to patterns of tenure. In an over-compressed concluding chapter Bowles draws our attention to the fact that luxurious late antique houses were not evenly distributed throughout the Roman Empire, but were found in distinct clusters. She suggests that they were a feature of cities and landscapes favoured by the imperial administration, cautiously identifying ‘an as-yet vague correlation between hotspots of imperial administration . . . and concentrations of monumentalized villas’. In order to press this argument she describes some regional landscapes in a little more detail, and this leads her into a brisk discussion of the situation in fourth-century Roman Britain (p. 93). Bowles suggests a correlation between the concentration of wealthy villas in south-west Britain, and the presence of bureaucrats involved in the control of supply chains for which the evidence is the distribution of south Dorset Black Burnished ware. This part of the study does not quite convince, but it leaves open the question of how and why late antique patronage networks could take such different trajectories in different regions. The underlying argument, that this investment in lavishly decorated private houses reflected an intense aristocratic competition, given impetus by new avenues for advantage obtained through imperial honours and service, is a compelling one.

Archaeology and the Post-war Reconstruction of Beirut

Abstract During Lebanons terrible civil war Beirut was partitioned by the Green Line, which separated West from East and cut through the heart of the historic city centre. The reunification of Beirut and revival of the town centre were urgent priorities in post-war reconstruction, and archaeologists became closely involved the reconstruction process. Divisions and arguments attended every stage of the post-war rebuilding, and heritage issues were hotly contested, driving the archaeologists involved into opposing camps. This paper attempts to explain why this happened, and reviews some of the successes and failures of the post-war rebuilding efforts. The reconstruction programme relied heavily on private sector funding, and the institutions of the Lebanese state were left marginalised and under-resourced. Public debate convinced the developers to make greater use of the historic and archaeological landscape, although questions can be raised about the way in which this exercise was taken forward. The archaeological excavations themselves, and the wider public debate over heritage values in the revived city centre, played an important part in the rehabilitation of Beirut.

Concept, design and build: Romans beyond Pompeii

SIMON P. ELLIS. Roman housing (2 ed.). viii+224 pages, 31 figures, 22 photographs. 2002. London: Duckworth; 0-7156-3196-9 paperback £16.99. SHELLEY HALES. The Roman house and social identity. xvi+294 pages, 108 figures. 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 0521-81433-2 hardback £55 & US

The Roman House in Britain

75. CLAUDIA LIEDTKE. Nebenraumdekorationen des 2. und 3. Jahrhunderts in Italien (Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Vol. 31). ix+373 pages, 39 figures, 62 b&w photographs, 39 colour photographs. 2003. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter; 3-11-017539-8 hardback €98.

The Roman house in Britain

This authoritative and original work sets the results of recent archaeological research in the context of classical scholarship, as it explores three main aspects of Romano-British buildings: * general characteristics of form and structure * the ways in which they were built and decorated * the range of activities for which they were designed. This evidence is then used to discuss the social practices and domestic arrangements that characterised Romano-British elite society. Fully illustrated, this volume is the essential guide to how houses were built, used and understood in Roman Britain.