Romano British - Is there really such a thing?

[kevin wooldridge]

Back in the late 70s I remember a little argy bargy in my local archaeology society when one 'distuingished' older member described a younger group as a 'bunch of Marxists'. When asked to justify his comment he stated he come to this conclusion after one youngster had asked whether he had ever considered the Roman invasion from the point of view of the Britons!!

[Dirty Dave Lincoln]

If the term is used only to refer to people in the British Isles who came under Roman governance, then a simple answer is..yes.

[Dinosaur]

all my OxCal dates are BC or AD because OxCal is a calibration programme

@ Jack - A radiocarbon date of 100BC-AD100 (SUERC) at a probability of 95% measured from a bone from a pit from Durham is the same as a radiocarbon date of 100BC-AD100 (SUERC) at a probability of 95% measured from a bone from a pit from New South Wales in Australia.
no no no it aint

Wow, the holy grail, a late IA/RB pit in Durham! Lots of RB pot everywhere (got 3 bits from Med contexts sitting on my desk right now) but no one has ever managed to find any archaeology to go with it. Would you settle for County Durham?

[Dinosaur]

For most of their history the Romans had pretty specific views on who was who, even in Italy you were generally either 'Roman', 'Latin', 'Ally' or 'Slave' for instance, they all had different legal/political status - we're just a bit unlucky over here in that all our 'Romano-British' history happened in the tail end of it all when things had got a bit confused and they'd started handing out 'Roman' citizenship to all and sundry, but I'm sure in reality the 'real' Romans knew who they were.

More usefully, can we get rid of the pointlessness that is the 'Bronze Age'? :face-stir:

The 'Early Bronze Age' is just the tail end of the Later Neolithic/Beaker bit (as reflected these days is most reports where most people have to reach for LNeo/EBA as a section heading - I've just done that and have another one coming up) and the rest of the 'Bronze Age' just seems to be the beginning of the 'Iron Age' but without the iron - they've stopped building henges etc, finally got bored with littering the landscape with henges and roundbarrows and settled down to sticking up big roundhouses, dividing the place up into fields, building hillforts, raising cows, making c**p pottery and occasionally heroically slaughtering their neighbours with fancy swords, sounds like a seamless transition straight into the Iron Age to me! :face-thinks:

[mpoole]

If the term is used only to refer to people in the British Isles who came under Roman governance, then a simple answer is..yes.

That's how I'd always understood the term. Not a blend of cultures but a period of time.

[Marcus Brody]

Given that none of the shorthand labels appears to be entirely problem-free, I'd like to propose that everything be divided into either 'olden times' or 'days of yore', though doubtless this will only lead to further problems about whether the pottery of the early days of yore was actually just a continuation of forms that started to appear in the late olden times. While I am of course aware of the problems associated with the use of terms such as Romano-British, they're useful when trying to communicate the age of material or its position in the time-line of history and pre-history to a non-specialist audience, and for that reason, I'd imagine that most archaeologists will continue to use them, at least to provide a basic descriptive framework. Yes, you may then wish to caveat this sort of description or provide additional nuanced detail in your report, but when you're speaking to the developer or to the member of the public on the other side of the herras fencing, it's useful to be able to describe the age of what you've found in fairly general and widely-understood terms.

[Dinosaur]

What about:

Here be dragons/dinosaurs/other lifeforms made out of stone that get chucked out of finds trays
The really old human bit when they'd found lots of sharp stones
Another really old bit but with big monuments with nothing much in them
A long blank bit while they were building all those roundhouses
The Roman bit with some finds at last
Another blank bit but with lots of gold and garnet bling for the treasure hunters
1066 and all that
The bit when they threw away lots of clay pipes
The bit your grandad can remember through rose-tinted spectacles
The slightly grubbier bit we can remember, with loads of crisp packets and beer cans

(some older contributors may have an advantage with the last two!)

....seems to fit in pretty well with the purely archaeological evidence :face-approve:

[Wax]

Yup Dinosaurs time line is perfectly understandable to me

[Kel]

Alternatively:

Ice and that, with occasional people
Interesting things occur which change now and again in different places in different ways at different times
Romans arrive and ruin everything
Some other stuff happens

Suggested replacement period nomenclature:
- Everything before an arbitrary date of AD43: "Interesting Stuff"
- AD43 and later: "Current Events"

Think that about sorts it out for me and Southern Britain.

[mpoole]

I recommend using the Horrible Histories as a baseline.