19th November 2014, 01:38 PM
How safe is the 'absence of evidence'? I've recently had occasion to point out at the end of a lecture that, based on the current archaeological evidence, for a large chunk of Yorkshire the Roman period by-and-large only actually occurs in a 150m wide strip [the Roman Rural Settlement project looks like it's going to bear this out, judging by what I've seen of their 'spots on maps'], but of course this may or may not be entirely due to 90%+ of the archaeology in the area in the last 75 years having been done on a single on-going road improvement...