2nd October 2011, 02:13 PM
Tricky explaining away all the towns, forts, roads and a damn great wall that seem to have popped up around here for a couple of hundred years before everyone went back to ignoring them....
'Native' seems to be a popular word in reports for describing all the stuff that never really changed at all, like all the nasty hand-made pottery - although of course depending on which specialist you send that to that can be almost any date...I have 3 seperate reports from two different specialists on the same 14 potsherds describing them as Neolithic, Iron Age and Anglian, C14 had to be used to sort it out!. Roundhouses seem to carry on regardless in much of Northern England, its just that the ones with a token sherd of Samian wind up as 'native', the others as 'Iron Age'.
Some pre-Roman traditions seem to take a break then reappear in the 4th century as if they knew civilisation was planning on coming to an end and were getting primed for the Dark Ages - good examples are cist/lined graves and strings of burials along boundaries, which seem to have a resurgence in the 4th-6th centuries
'Native' seems to be a popular word in reports for describing all the stuff that never really changed at all, like all the nasty hand-made pottery - although of course depending on which specialist you send that to that can be almost any date...I have 3 seperate reports from two different specialists on the same 14 potsherds describing them as Neolithic, Iron Age and Anglian, C14 had to be used to sort it out!. Roundhouses seem to carry on regardless in much of Northern England, its just that the ones with a token sherd of Samian wind up as 'native', the others as 'Iron Age'.
Some pre-Roman traditions seem to take a break then reappear in the 4th century as if they knew civilisation was planning on coming to an end and were getting primed for the Dark Ages - good examples are cist/lined graves and strings of burials along boundaries, which seem to have a resurgence in the 4th-6th centuries