3rd October 2011, 08:55 PM
Kel Wrote:"Romano-British" is another of those convenient umbrella terms like "Neolithic" that means different things, in different regions, at different times. We Moderns do love our classification, but the nature of culture (sic) is that it moves in fits and starts and doesn't give us the nice smooth transitions into which we keep trying to shoehorn history/prehistory. I think the terms we use and how we apply them, sometimes say more about our mania for categorising things, than they say about the things we're trying to categorise.
As you observe, "Romano-British" in south-eastern England was a completely different beast to "Romano-British" to the north or west. Maybe some areas were actually "Brito-Roman"?
Modern humans are naturally cultural magpies. Facilitating cultural scope-creep is something we've always been good at. Nab the bits of a culture that we like best and forget the bits we don't. I could murder a curry...
Well put! Nice neat categories never did go well with fluidity and change. Was that curry over rice?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.