Romano British - Is there really such a thing?

[Jack]

Yep. We already have an independently measurable time frame called calendar years. No need to stick to old categories of time that are badly defined, arbitrary and non-linear.

The Romano-British is not a sensible time period, the term refers to an idea of a 'people'.

Also the inherent errors of the different dating techniques need to be taken into account in any archaeological discussion. The wise use such imprecise terms as early 1st millennium BC etc for a reason. They are being accurate.

Terms like mesolithic, neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman etc etc, create boundaries that weren't there...and also are behind artificial 'gaps' in the archaeological record that some love to theorise as an absence.

[vulpes]

ie early 1st millennium BC or late 1st millennium

Surely you mean BCE? Or are you ok with the similarly meaningless Christian hegemony?

[Oxbeast]

I'm not sure if rebranding BC/AD as Common Era is any less hegemonic. Who was this era common to anyway? To the people who used the BC/AD system.

This is one of the best threads for a while though.

@Kevin

.I mean we have had Swiss archers, headless Vikings and all sorts of Jutes, Angles and Saxons...so why no Romano-Brit DNA?

I think some of this was based on oxygen isotope analysis; using the ratios to tell where a person had grown up. You can also see them moving about during their lifetime. Certainly the Swiss archer and several other prehistoric burials that I heard of.

I tend to prefer 'the Roman period', rather than the cultural label of Romano-British. There would have been all sorts of cultural arrangements and change over this 450 year period, as there would have been in the Iron Age.

[P Prentice]

luckily for some of us we can fine tune the first four centuries AD to the sub-century without the need to say roman - and we have refered to the 5th 6th centuries without recourse to anglo saxon etc for ages

[Dirty Dave Lincoln]

All these academical objections!! tsk tsk, next people will be saying no to using 'Middle Ages'

[vulpes]

could fall foul of the Ageism Legislation - best just to call them the over 40s!

[moreno]

Some may be familiar with the term BP (Before Present). Calibrated BP and non calibrated, usually appearing as bp in not so recent publications, are more frequently utilised. 1950 is the benchmark. For specifics wikipedia is useful. In some archaeological circles, or if one prefers- ditches, gullies and postholes etc, there has been movement away from BC/AD and BCE.

A Wikipedia definition (cuz I can’t be bothered to paraphrase after a long day in the field).

“Dates determined using radiocarbon dating come in two kinds: uncalibrated (also called Libby or raw) and calibrated (also called Cambridge) dates.[12] Uncalibrated radiocarbon dates may be expressed using BP years; however, they are not identical to calendar dates. This has to do with the fact that the level of atmospheric radiocarbon (carbon-14 or 14C) has not been strictly constant during the span of time that can be radiocarbon-dated. Uncalibrated radiocarbon ages can be converted to calendar dates by means of calibration curves based on comparison of raw radiocarbon dates of samples independently dated by other methods, such as dendrochronology (dating on basis of tree growth-rings) and stratigraphy (dating on the basis of sediment layers in mud or sedimentary rock). Such calibrated dates are expressed as cal BP, where "cal" indicates "calibrated years."”

A different approach, but for some, it's quite useful.

[vulpes]

so for archaeological remains post-1950 one would use PBP perhaps?

Maybe best to keep BP for C14 etc?

Could the Human Era be the way forward? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

[Dinosaur]

Are you including other human species in that or just Homo Sapiens? You may have to ban palaeontologists from working in East Africa any more if you want to avoid having to change all the dates in your reports every 5 minutes....

PP - you got a Roman pot person who's prepared to date anything closer than '2nd-early 3rd century'? Amazing! Please forward their contact details, it'll save all that messing about with matrices etc trying to bodge the pot report into the stratigraphic phasing. Then all we'll need are med pot people who can come up with something better than '13th/14th century'.....

[BAJR]

It does seem we have tied ourselves in knots in a desperate atttempt to keep things nice and clean.

Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age... oh... more complicated?

Palaeolithic Mesolithic Neolithic... oh... more complicated?

Lower Palaeolithic Middle Palaeolithic Upper Palaeolithic oh... more complicated?

repeat ad infinitum and then multiply by non generic locational data!

Did a person living in a farm make Roman pottery? even if it looks like the previous Iron Age pottery? What is Roman Pottery? Why does it all date from 2nd-3rd century (can I be a Roman Pot specialist?) Is it cultural or regional or governmental that makes the individual Roman?

:face-huh: