kevin wooldridge Wrote:I am guessing by the title of the Pollard report that the individual in question was buried at Springhead .... this site lies close to the Roman road (latterly Watling Street) and is the site of a number of temple structures as well as a high status villa and possibly an emporium. I think there are a number of factors there which might suggest the burial was of a visitor to these shores. I'd be interested in clarifying how they arrived at the date attributed to this inhumation....

killgrove Wrote:It's not that foreigners in England or in Rome (or anywhere else in the Empire) are a surprise, it's that most people in the Empire acculturated and we have little archaeological evidence of people buried with the trappings of another culture. So isotope analysis is (at least for my work in Rome) the only way to find immigrants who weren't commemorated as such on tombstones. Once we find the bodies of immigrants, we can ask questions like: Were their lives worse than those of the locals? You'd think that they were, since the immigrants were more likely to be slaves, but the data on disease don't support a difference in health or lifestyle at this point. That's why I and others are looking for/at immigrants in the Empire - histories tell us they existed, but we know precious little about their lives.