Roman Finds

Context and Theory

Richard Hingley, Steven Willis

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781785705014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Studies on finds in Roman Britain and the Western Provinces have come to greater prominence in the literature of recent years. The quality of such work has also improved, and is now theoretically informed, and based on rich data-sets. Work on finds over the last decade or two has changed our understanding of the Roman era in profound ways, and yet despite such encouraging advances and such clear worth, there has to date, been little in the way of a dedicated forum for the presentation and evaluation of current approaches to the study of material culture. The conference at which these papers were initially presented has gone some way to redressing this, and these papers bring the very latest studies on Roman finds to a wider audience. Twenty papers are here presented covering various themes.

Method and Theory

5 Telling Stories About Brougham, or the Importance of the Specialist Report

H. E. M. Cool

In many respects the Roman world was very different from what had gone before and what was to come after it. One of the most obvious differences, especially noticeable in a peripheral area such as Roman Britain, is the sheer wealth of material culture that often appears to have been made, used and discarded with almost reckless abandon. This is a resource of almost infinite potential. Not only does it normally provide the detailed time frame for any individual site, it clothes the bare skeleton of structural narratives, placing the people who lived at the sites in their social contexts. Within Romano-British archaeology, it has been traditional for this material to be studied by a community of specialists who act as the gatekeepers to what are seen as areas of arcane knowledge. The specialist reports they produce are the primary data on which our pictures of the past are founded. After all, a fragment of pottery only becomes useful after someone has identified what sort of pot it would have come from, when that pot would have been used, where it might have been made, etc. Generally within our discipline these reports are an under-used resource. This paper explores why this should be, suggests a way forward for overcoming the problem and finally considers why a better appreciation of specialist work is fundamental for the future health of the discipline.

How best to publish the results of archaeological excavations has been a matter of anxious debate ever since the rescue boom of the 1960s and 1970s showed the volume of material that could be expected from large urban excavations, and how expensive consequent publication was. One of the areas that was felt to be expendable was the specialist report. Solutions ranged from banishing them to the archive and producing a synthetic overview, to reproducing them on microfiche. Neither was felt to be particularly successful by either the specialist communities or the excavators (see, for example, McWhirr 1986, 14), but it is easy to see why they were tried. Traditionally, specialist reports have been seen as appendices. A glance at many excavation reports makes this explicit. Sometimes they are explicitly referred to as such (e.g. Barker et al. 1997), and sometimes they are just placed where one might expect appendices, i.e. after the site narrative and the wider discussion of the site within its social and chronological setting, and before the index (e.g. Neal et al. 1990). This position within the text, reminiscent of an afterthought, has frequently been matched by a lack of integration of the information they contain into the sections devoted to the wider discussion of the site. Equally, the use of the term ‘specialist report’ places them slightly to one side of archaeological endeavour. One does indeed need specialist knowledge to produce a report on samian stamps, intaglios or fish bones. Equally, however, one needs specialist knowledge to excavate a site and produce a coherent site narrative, yet the people who do the latter are not, to my knowledge, commonly referred to as stratigraphic specialists.

These are not merely matters of semantics; but reflect a deeper malaise where the work of the stratigraphic specialists was perceived, and perhaps still is, as the ‘real’ archaeology with the other contributions seen, whether explicitly admitted or not, as optional extras once the dating evidence has been extracted. An additional problem has been that as excavation reports have traditionally been drawn together by the stratigraphic specialist, and as the stratigraphy has been given primacy, the interactions between the different strands of data that have been emphasised have tended to be vertical rather than horizontal. It is the interaction between the stratigraphy and single aspects of the finds data that is mainly considered; the use of pottery to provide spot-dates and thus a chronological framework for the site is a classic example of this. The interactions between all the different strands of the data where the stratigraphy may take a subsidiary role are less often emphasised. To a certain extent, this is not surprising as far too many specialist reports are written with a specialist audience in mind, and others outside of that circle may struggle to extract useful information from them. Though a specialist would be failing in their duty if their reports did not contain the type of high level information that their fellows will need to carry the study forward, it should not be forgotten that one of the main aims of a report should be to convey clearly to a nonspecialist what that material is saying about that particular site.

Changes in attitudes can start to be seen as a result of the more thoughtful planning and management of large archaeological projects that has developed since the publication of MAP2 (Andrews 1991). The pendulum has also swung back to much fuller print publication following the realisation that the specialist reports are: ‘a resource to be used, questioned, reinterpreted, hopefully many times and over many years’ (Wilson 2002, xviii). Increasingly there are also attempts to provide overviews to make explicit what the specialist reports can contribute to the understanding of a site. This is especially noticeable within the domain of small finds where specialist knowledge is perhaps most fragmented (see for example Viner 1998, 309–12; Cooper 1999, 239–46; Cool 2002). There remains, however, the problem of how to integrate all strands of information in a site report so that, while providing all the data for future re-analysis, it also provides a coherent narrative of the site.

One way of solving this problem is to take the view that any archaeological excavation that is considered worthy of publication has a story to tell, and that the report should be structured so as to tell that story. This involves planning from the beginning, so that the eventual publication is the outcome of a project design that is firmly based in what the best theoretical and practical models for the type of site are. This doesn’t mean that the story is pre-ordained at the outset, for it will emerge through the interactions of the data, the models and the team members. It does mean, however, that everyone working on the project must realise that their contribution is not a self-contained whole, but part of a larger organic process. To illustrate this approach, the analysis of a site that I and others have recently worked on will be considered.

The site is at Brougham in Cumbria which, in Roman terms, lies where the road over the Pennines via Stainmore meets the main western north–south road. Very little is known about the site. The fort has seen very little excavation (Higham and Jones 1991, 20, 39), and most information comes from epigraphic evidence. The presence of a cult centre dedicated to Balatucadrus, for example, might be suspected from the number of dedications to him found over the years (RIB I, nos. 772–7); and a cemetery is also indicated by chance finds of tombstones (RIB I nos. 784– 8). In 1966 and 1967 rescue excavations were carried out by the then Ministry of Public Buildings and Works in advance of, but mainly at the same time as, major road improvements. These uncovered a large cremation cemetery dating to the third century on a hilltop outside the fort and vicus. This remains the largest cemetery ever to have been excavated outside of a military site in the north. Various attempts had been made to analyse and publish the material over the years, but without success because the stratigraphic records were poor. In some cases it has to be suspected that the original records had been lost; in others it was likely that, due to the extremely difficult circumstances of excavation, detailed records had never been made. What did survive in large quantities were all the finds, consisting of cremated human and animal bone, vessels of pottery, glass and metal, items of jewellery, etc. The records of the associations of these were relatively good, consisting of both formal registers, information written on the bags, and annotations on the grave plans, where they existed.

When we were approached early in 2000 by English Heritage to re-assess the archive with a view to analysis and publication, it became apparent that any analysis would have to be designed around what would normally be the specialist reports, and that only with full integration would there be any hope of making progress. Given that the site was a cemetery the obvious story to attempt to tell was that of the funerals that had taken place in it. To do this it was immediately apparent that it would be helpful to look beyond what was the normal frame of reference for writing up a Romano-British cemetery, and to consider how the insights gained by colleagues working in different geographical areas and periods could help us. As it was a cremation cemetery, for example, advances made in the understanding of cremation processes derived originally from the study of Bronze Age and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries (see, for example, McKinley 1997; 2000) were particularly helpful. They suggested that in a cemetery one might expect to find a range of features with cremated remains and not just formal urned burials. This agreed with the observation made a quarter of a century or so previously by Todd, to the effect that German archaeologists working on Roman cemeteries recognised a far wider range of cremation-related deposits than those working in Roman Britain did (Todd 1977, 39). This was a state of affairs which, judged by Philpott’s survey, had continued to be the case until relatively recently (Philpott 1991, 8). One of our models at the outset, therefore, was that though the urned cremation burials formed the most obvious funeraryrelated deposit it was likely that there were other types, such as re-deposited pyre debris deposits, which would also provide evidence about the funerals.

This was of great help in solving one of the problems that had beset previous attempts to publish the cemetery. The excavators were of the opinion that approximately 40% of the deposits had been robbed. Though there was drawn evidence in three or four cases of secondary pits within the grave removing something, on the whole robbed graves appeared to be characterised by not having whole groups of vessels like the urned cremation burials, but rather having a muddled fill of sherds, fragments, etc. These deposits seemed likely to be good candidates for being pyre debris rather than formal urned burials that had been robbed. As already noted, the intellectual climate in Britain when this site was dug, and when earlier attempts had been made to study it, would not have made the recognition of such deposits likely. Suspecting this was the case was one thing; proving it was more difficult in the absence of any systematic recording of charcoal or fuel ash in the original records, as it is this material that would normally be used to identify such deposits. Instead, the presence or absence of pyre goods (melted beads, burnt bone veneers, melted copper alloy pieces) were used and were found to be more common in the proposed pyre debris deposits. A Chi Square test was carried out, and it showed that the distribution pattern was statistically significant. This interaction between the data contained in three separate small finds reports therefore provided the evidence on which the deposit types could be defined (urned cremation burial, unurned formal cremation burial, re-deposited pyre debris, etc). It is a good example of how finds can be used to provide information about a variety of processes, here depositional, other than the mere dating role they are often relegated to.

When planning the analysis of all the material it was also obvious that, as we were trying to explore funerals, what we were looking at was how the living behaved and what their attitudes were to the dead. Such behaviour is culturally conditioned, and it was felt important to examine what the patterns in the data could tell us about this, rather than relying on models of what ‘Roman’ burials ought to be. The people at Brougham were burying their dead in the third century almost on the very edge of the Empire; and it has to be suspected that their funerals would be different to the ones which often feature in such works as Toynbee’s Death and Burial in the Roman World with its emphasis on an earlier period and the Mediterranean.

Much ethnographic and archaeological literature suggests that different treatments are accorded to people depending on their age and sex (see, for example, Parker Pearson 1999). To explore this it was obvious that the osteological examination of the human bone was central, and would have remained so even if we had had a better stratigraphic record. In the human bone report, Jacqueline McKinley was able to identify 17 different age states, many of which overlapped. In order to explore whether people of different ages and sexes were being treated differently, it was necessary in the first instance to simplify this to acquire samples that could be meaningfully compared. The 17 age categories were thus reduced to four: infant (5 years or younger), immature (5–18), adult (over 18) and uncertain. The adults could be divided into three (male, female and uncertain) and there was also a category of double burials where two individuals had been buried together. Once this framework was in place it was possible to examine the distribution of the different pyre and grave goods both by age and sex, and through time. The graves had been furnished with large numbers of Black Burnished I jars and these provided an invaluable dating tool as the dated typology of these in the third century is well established (Bidwell 1985, 174; Holbrook and Bidwell 1991, 95). It was possible to divide many of the deposits between three phases within the overall timespan which stretched from AD 200/20 to AD 300/ 310.

The results surpassed all expectations. It was possible to demonstrate a major difference between the way the younger people (inf...