Romano British - Is there really such a thing?

[Dinosaur]

Coming from Central Italy probably helps :face-kiss:

[Jack]

Yep Hosty, things don't have to be that complicated. Archaeologists should follow the example of the other scientists and measure things using independent scales with standard units.
N.B. as far as I can remember cal BP dates are frowned upon due to confusion between cal and uncal, but its not a surprise that wikipedia is correct and incorrect at the same time.

After all years BP (before 1950) are just as arbitrary as BC/AD. It wont be too long before you'll get negative years BP or years after present and your back to the same problem (BP/AP :p). Best to calibrate to calendar years BC/AD as it is the standard date system for the planet (at the moment).

Once the scientific community agrees on a standard time scale that starts at 0 and goes to infinity (like the Kelvin scale for temperature) then it'll be easy enough to convert to that. But where is 0 time?

The point is calendar years are a consistent (ish!) and universal measure of time. Radiocarbon dating (after calibration and taking into account error functions) measures time independent of everything else (other than relativity and quantum effects). 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.

Whereas the 'start', early, mid- and late Iron (for instance), or even the 'Roman' period is different even within a single county, but is most apparent when comparing England with Scotland, Ireland, France, Denmark etc..etc.....

Hence using 'Roman' or any of the other arbitrary nonsense terms as a period of time is silly.

People should should stop doing it......or i'll keep pointing at them and calling them silly.

I would say though, if you wanna make your date sound sexy, its still perfectly correct to equate your boring sounding (but accurate) date to other things that were (probably) happening.

e.g. ........the settlement was probably abandoned and the enclosure ditch in-filled by the late 1st century AD and hence probably fell out of use during or soon after the Roman advance into the region.

But NOT.....the settlement was occupied in the Iron Age and was abandoned by the Roman period. !
silly.

[mpoole]

So, Jack... where do you stand on 'Celtic' as an adjective?

[GnomeKing]

never mind that : Jack is spot on;

"....the settlement was probably abandoned and the enclosure ditch in-filled by the late 1st century AD and hence probably fell out of use during or soon after the Roman advance into the region."

of course how the 'Roman Advance' is defined is another matter....occupation, alliance, trade, ideas...concrete social process, not applied retrospective terminology...

...and without much insight into the fineries of muddy scraps of 'RB' pottery maybe I will still need some easily communicative Name for them...

(but Jack is right)

[mpoole]

never mind that : Jack is spot on;

"....the settlement was probably abandoned and the enclosure ditch in-filled by the late 1st century AD and hence probably fell out of use during or soon after the Roman advance into the region."

of course how the 'Roman Advance' is defined is another matter....occupation, alliance, trade, ideas...concrete social process, not applied retrospective terminology...

...and without much insight into the fineries of muddy scraps of 'RB' pottery maybe I will still need some easily communicative Name for them...

(but Jack is right)

I'm sure he is but it's a genuine question. Where do you draw the line in removing all/any context to the dating of things? Also, where do you pin the starting point, and if terms such as Romano-British are useless, what do you propose to use. CE, BCE? Aren't those simply veneers over the same concept?

As for needing easily communicative names, doesn't that put things right back to the starting point? I'm concerned that replacing one kind of naming system for another will permit intrusions from people with modern political/cultural agendas to dictate things. Roman advance will become Roman invasion.... and so on.

[Dirty Boy]

never mind that : Jack is spot on;

"....the settlement was probably abandoned and the enclosure ditch in-filled by the late 1st century AD and hence probably fell out of use during or soon after the Roman advance into the region."

of course how the 'Roman Advance' is defined is another matter....occupation, alliance, trade, ideas...concrete social process, not applied retrospective terminology...


(but Jack is right)

And of course, the fact that a lot of people in Britain were getting their hands on Roman goods afore Cladius' elephants trod upon these shores. See the client kings of Augustus. I'm sure there's a great classical quote about the Romans trading poor quality wine in amphora for large amounts of slaves from less "civilised" parts of the world (possibly more to applies to Continental activity, but was probably going on here too)

[Jack]

So, Jack... where do you stand on 'Celtic' as an adjective?

Don't even get me started on that one!

[mpoole]

Don't even get me started on that one!

No, I'm not baiting you, I'm genuinely interested where the term Celtic would fit in if terms such as Romano-British were dropped by the wayside. I try to avoid using it at all but there seems to be that persistence in the minds of a significant number of people (mostly non-archaeological, granted) that insist that it's a valid term to use in describing archaeology and culture.

How do you cure that sort of misuse?

[pictish]

No, I'm not baiting you, I'm genuinely interested where the term Celtic would fit in if terms such as Romano-British were dropped by the wayside. I try to avoid using it at all but there seems to be that persistence in the minds of a significant number of people (mostly non-archaeological, granted) that insist that it's a valid term to use in describing archaeology and culture.

How do you cure that sort of misuse?

I have had a few discussions around this both with people from the Uk and other EU countries , I think alot of the misuse as you call it comes from very compact courses at school or books that really dont explain what was happening at the time as well as very short tv programmes. I think both the terms romano-british and celtic terms are wrong as they lead to the false impression that everyone and everything at that time was either the same people or living under the same influences.

[moreno]

As a term Romano-British can be useful for describing an event of socio-cultural interaction, so I would tend to agree with others in the thread. It can be useful for describing a process of structural (in this case social/cultural) reorganization over time, and in the broadest sense defining a form which has a measurable difference. Using the term in this manner provides a reference for discussing the topic. When it comes to reducing the category to specifics, such as attempting to differentiate specific moments of transition, the term may no longer be so useful.

Regarding BP, it is the preferred method for notating 14c dates, particularly when discussing prehistory of greater antiquity where for obvious reasons calendar dates are not particularly useful. OxCal and Beta Analytic usually report their results in calibrated years BP. There was an issue with using BP interchangeably for calibrated and uncalibrated 14c dates which did lead to confusion. More recent citations follow the convention of using Calibrated BP for calibrated dates.

The issue raised in the thread regarding the usefulness of the term Romano-British can be applied to the Near Eastern and Levantine archaeology. The same sort of issues crop up with the same sort of discussions.