Resource Assessment: Roman (revised 2017)
The 2017 Roman Specialist Group consisted of Nick Hodgson (Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)(Convenor), Lindsay Allason-Jones (independent), Rob Collins (Newcastle University), Jim Crow (University of Edinburgh), David Heslop (independent), Frances McIntosh (English Heritage), Jennifer Proctor (Pre-Construct Archaeology).
The following specialists or members of the previous specialist group were consulted: Mike Collins (English Heritage), Paul Frodsham (independent), Richard Hingley (Durham University), Don O’Mara (Historic England), Steve Willis (University of Kent).
History of research
The advent of Roman rule in the North-East of England had a profound qualitative and quantitative impact on the archaeological record. A suite of new site types appeared, particularly those related to the Roman military infrastructure, and in many areas there was a significant change in the availability of material culture. For the first time, written sources, both literary and epigraphic, become available so that from the 1st century AD there is evidence for the names of individuals, places and political and ethnic groups. This combination of written evidence and a significant body of highly diagnostic material culture (particularly ceramics and coins) allows the archaeology to be explored at a chronological resolution not practical for earlier periods.
Hadrian's Wall is the iconic Roman monument in the North-East, its national and international importance being reflected in its World Heritage Site status. Due to the Wall's outstanding importance, the large-scale heritage management issues it raises, and the sheer quantity of material relating to it, as well as the fact that it crosses two regions (North-East and North-West), the North-East Regional Research Framework does not tackle it comprehensively. The Wall is instead subject of its own separate research framework (Symonds and Mason 2009), which is being revised in parallel to the current revision of the North-east framework. However, the impact of the Wall on the region both in Roman times and in modern archaeological terms means that it cannot be ignored, and frequent reference will be made to it in what follows.
The study of the remains of the Roman period has a long tradition in the region. The first important account was by William Camden in his Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586 (first English language edition: Camden 1610). Periodically revised by successive editors with contributions from various local agents, this remained the main source for the Roman antiquities of the region until the early 18th century, when John Horsley's monumental Britannia Romana (1732) was published. Epigraphy and observations of visible remains form the backbone of research in this period, which frequently describes details that have since disappeared.
The first significant archaeological excavations on the Wall were carried out by John Hodgson, who started work at Housesteads in 1822. Hodgson was also the first to date the Wall to Hadrian; previously the Vallum was believed to be the earliest defence, supplemented by a wall built during the reign of Septimius Severus. Anthony Hedley and John Clayton carried out other excavations at the same time. Hedley worked at Vindolanda in the early 1830s but died in 1835, before a report on his work could be submitted to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle. Clayton, nowthe subject of a PhD thesis by Frances McIntosh (date and bibliog ref), bought up much land along the Wall and dug many sites including three milecastles, several of the forts, Coventina's Well, and carried out a decades long programme of excavation at the fort at Chesters, in the grounds of his own country seat.
The Wall by no means monopolised excavation projects in the nineteenth century. An important local patron was the Duke of Northumberland who, in 1852, funded excavation at High Rochester in Redesdale. As well as commissioning the first accurate survey of the Wall, carried out by Henry MacLauchlan between 1852 and 1854, Northumberland also commissioned a survey of Dere Street (then known as Watling Street) by MacLauchlan in 1850-51. This included plans of several forts north and south of the Wall, such as Lanchester, together with records of finds and associated earthworks. Other very important nineteenth century surveys and excavations of Roman forts included Risingham (1843-49), South Shields (1875-77), and Binchester (1878-80), the latter two published to high standard for the time.
As well as excavation and survey there was also an increased focus on epigraphy. The most notable early scholar in this field was John Collingwood Bruce, who produced the Lapidarium Septentrionale(1875), an overview of all the inscriptions and sculptures known at the time (Collingwood Bruce 1875; Breeze 2003). He also wrote The Roman Wall (1851), the third edition (1867) of which was the first widespread popularisation of Hodgson's theory of a Hadrianic date for the Wall. In 1863 he published his Handbook of the Roman Wall, which continues to be updated (14th edition edited by David Breeze, 2006).
The major period of broadly scientific excavation began in the 1890s, including Robert Carr Bosanquet's excavations at Housesteads (Bosanquet 1904). The ambitious excavation of the Roman town at Corbridge (1906-1914), published in considerable detail, stands on the cusp of the nineteenth-century era of pre-stratigraphic excavation and the emerging scientific approach. Work by John Pattinson Gibson on Turret 44b led to a series of collaborations between the major figures of Roman archaeology in the region, including F. Gerald Simpson, Robin Collingwood and Ian Richmond. They would go on the 1930s to work out the basic structural sequence of Hadrian’s Wall that still holds good today. In the late 1920s and early 1930s aburst of activity saw the foundation of the North of England Excavation Committee, founded by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle in 1924 to encourage 'under proper supervision the excavation of sites in the North'. Due to its Newcastle base it tended to focus on sites on the eastern half of the Wall. Also in the east, the improvement of the Military Road (B6318) resulted in a series of rescue excavations.
The importance of this work was recognised by Durham University who, in 1924, appointed F. G. Simpson as its director of excavation, a post he relinquished in 1931 to allow Eric Birley to be appointed as a lecturer. Birley was to stay at Durham for 40 years, directing his students to research on a wide range of aspects of the Wall and the Roman army (for an overview of his life see Dobson 1998). Important milestones in the study of the areas north and south of the Wall in this period were, for Durham, a synthetic study by Petch (1925) and Kenneth Steer’s PhD thesis The Archaeology of Roman Durham (1938) (which remained standard until Brian Dobson's re-consideration of 1970); for the north, Richmond’s The Romans in Redesdale (1940).
As this brief account demonstrates, the early phases of investigation into the Roman archaeology of the North-east were dominated by individuals, though in the later 19th and early 20th century the role of societies, particularly the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle, became increasingly important. State intervention only began in the 1920s when parts of the Wall were taken into Guardianship. The work of the Ministry of Works, Department of Environment and latterly English Heritage, in the recording and conservation of the archaeological resource has carried state participation in the study of Roman archaeology in the area through to the present day. The presence of two departments of archaeology in the region, at Durham and Newcastle, has also influenced scholarship, and scholars such as Eric Birley and Ian Richmond shaped their departments as centres for the study of this period. More recently, major work has also been carried out by local authority museums, notably Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, with recent excavation and curation of South Shields and Wallsend, as well as extensive exploration of the urban sections of the Wall. Work by independent scholars has also been significant; the long-term campaign of excavation by the Vindolanda Trust hasbeen on a very large scale and has produced a number of internationally significant finds, such as the Vindolanda tablets.
From the 1960s there were a number of overviews of the Roman archaeology of the region. The first was Peter Salway's The Frontier People of Roman Britain (Salway 1965), one of the first major attempts to consider the evidence for the civilian as well as military settlement, but now almost entirely overtaken by new knowledge (much of it gained in a series of geophysical surveys carried out by the late Alan Biggins, David Taylor and their colleagues) of the form, extent and date of occupation of the civilian settlements attached to Roman military sites. The long history of research on the Wall has been summarised in several publications, most recently Breeze 2014.
For an overview of the earlier work on the Wall, Birley's Research on Hadrian's Wall (1961) remains a standard text, but can now be supplemented by further historiographical study of Roman archaeological research in the region, in which the study of the subject has become a subject of study in its own right. Recent papers which explore the history of research on Hadrian's Wall and the North-East include work by David Breeze (2003) on the role of John Collingwood Bruce and on the development of thought about Hadrian’s Wall (2014) and, reviewing the way the significance of the Wall has changed for people over time, Richard Hingley’s Hadrian’s Wall – a Life (2012).
Since the 1980s major excavations, carried out for a variety of managerial, tourist-promotional and research reasons have continued to take place at some major fort sites (South Shields, Wallsend, Vindolanda, Birdoswald, Binchester). However, a conservation philosophy with a presumption against research excavation for its own sake has meant that since 1990 curatorial bodies have not encouraged or promoted much in the way of intrusive investigation into the history of the Wall itself and its minor installations, which consequently remain relatively poorly documented and understood, especially where the sites are unthreatened. However, since the introduction of PPG16 and associated planning guidance (currently the national Planning Policy Framework) in 1990 there has been an increase in interventions into the Roman-period archaeology of the region. These have helped expand our knowledge of Hadrian’s Wall, particularly in urban areas where previous knowledge even of the actual course of the Wall was patchy and where the pace of development has been greatest. Most dramatic, however, had been the way that developer-funded archaeology has cast light on rural settlement away from the Wall, bringing to light previously unknown or archaeologically invisible site-types and funding landmark publications as well as excavations of threatened sites. When the first version of the present framework was published it could still be considered that the only really substantial work on civilian rural settlement was that carried outby George Jobey, whose pioneering and almost single-handed exploration had dominated the study of Iron Age and Roman-period native settlement, predominantly north of the Wall (see Chapter 5). Upland survey work, such as on the Otterburn training area and by Denis Coggins in the North Pennines, had also revealed many settlements, though without excavation it had proved difficult to date them closely. The evidence base for sites of this type has been hugely expanded by developer-funded archaeology and the conclusions reached by George Jobey can be regarded in a different light. Indeed, a new dimension has been added to our understanding of the density of settlement in lowland areas and of interaction between the Roman military and the rural population, and old categories of study are breaking down: where once ‘Iron Age’ and ‘Roman’ archaeologists appeared to operate in parallel but self-contained worlds (‘Roman and native’ in the parlance of the 1980s), the need is now felt to understand social development in the Roman north-east holistically, and for the region to be regarded as a dynamic frontier-zone, and not merely a remote area where the presence of the military hindered ‘normal’ Roman provincial development.
Within the North East, these developments have led to much recent discussion of the Iron Age-Roman transition, which can be most clearly observed through rural settlement, where the primary settlement form of the eastern lowlands of the region did not radically change with the arrival of the Romans in the later-1st century, but appears not to have been maintained after the consolidation of the frontier on the Tyne-Solway Isthmus (Hodgson et al. 2012; Proctor 2009). It is important to note here major recent developments just outside the region that will eventually have far-reaching implications for the understanding for understanding the Iron Age-Roman period transition in the north-east: these are the final publication of the Stanwick research project (Haselgrove 2016) and the major excavation, still in progress atthe time of writing, that has preceded the A1 widening at Catterick/Scotch corner.
At the opposite end of the Roman period, there has been a considerable preoccupation with the increasing evidence from Hadrian’s Wall and other Roman forts, towns, and villas across northern England attesting to various activities in the fifth century and beyond (Collins 2012, 2017).
Since the first edition of this Research Framework some research tools have become available which will stand as significant landmarks in the study of the Roman archaeology of the region. The Hadrian's Wall National Mapping Programme (NMP) has mapped the whole of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site (WHS) and its landscape setting, synthesising information available from aerial photographs and other sources. The results have not been formally published, but have been incorporated into the new 1:25,000 Archaeological map of Hadrian’s Wall, published by English Heritage in 2010, the first authoritative published map of the Wall since the last (1972) edition of the old Ordnance Survey archaeological map, which the new one has taken as its model.
Of works of reference relating to inscriptions and sculpture it is important to note that Roman Inscriptions of Britain has now been extended to embrace discoveries up to 2006 (Tomlin, Wright and Hassall 2009). Work is currently in progress on the final volume of Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani, covering the hinterland of Hadrian’s Wall (Northumberland south of the Stanegate, Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Cumbria, Lancashire and Derbyshire). Sculpture from Corbridge and the Wall east of the North Tyne up to 1974, and from the Wall further west up to 1986, are covered in CSIR volume I, fascicules I and 6 respectively.
In the past there have been few general works that address the rural population of the region (but see Hingley 2004 and Hodgson 2017, the latter a monograph on Hadrian’s Wall but attempting to place the Wall in a regional context and to assess its effects on the rural population). Now, the region has been covered by the monumental Roman Rural Settlement project, a synthesis of the excavated evidence for rural settlement in Roman England and Wales, including the flood of new information since the introduction of developer funding in 1990 (Smith et al. 2016; online resource at although this remains relatively limited for the north-east compared to southern Britain.
Existing research frameworks
A series of initiatives at both regional and national level provide research agendas from which to work. At a local level the Research Framework for Hadrian's Wall (Symonds and Mason 2009), which provides a research structure for the study of the Wall in both the North-West and the North-East, is now undergoing its own process of revision.
Still of value at a regional level are the papers covering the Roman period in the Past, Present and Future volume which arose out of a conference held in Durham in 1996, with useful stocktakings on military sites (Crow 2002), non-military sites (McCarthy 2002, identifying the need for macro-level study of the wider Roman-period landscape and environment combined with micro- level or site-specific analysis of data, including site formation processes and the study of cultural assemblages), and of finds (Allason-Jones 2002, calling for further work on military equipment from the North-East, placing it in its national and international context, and more work investigation of the poorly researched topics of cemeteries and vici).
At the national level, the most influential contribution has been Britons and Romans: advancing an archaeological agenda (James and Millett 2001), a volume of collected papers which arose out of a session at the Roman Archaeology Conference sponsored by English Heritage (e.g. J. D. Hill 2001; James 2001; Allason-Jones 2001; Evans 2001). As well as highlighting particular research topics, there are suggestions here for structural initiatives, such as the training of finds specialists and improved publication of 'grey literature', issues that are also echoed in this document. Similar suggestions were made in Town and country in England: frameworks for archaeological research (Perring et al 2002) which laid out an agenda for work on urban archaeology. Although its Roman case study focused on Essex and Colchester, that volume presented a series of methodological recommendations that have relevance for the North-East.