Selected projects
4.19.9 Iron Age and Roman rural settlement
Following the Monument Protection Programme's national evaluation of regional patterning in medieval and later settlement, the University of Durham was commissioned to undertake a new analysis of the character of known Iron Age and Roman rural settlement in England. The Monument Protection Programme's current approach to Roman rural settlement regards settlements as single monuments within a set of morphologically defined Monument Class Descriptions. These classifications cover only a fraction of the observed variation in Roman settlement form, however, and do not take account of pre-Roman settlements of similar types. They are also heavily dependent upon categorisations based on historical, rather than on archaeological, evidence and give little scope for taking regionality into account. The new project was therefore designed to provide a new framework, and a robust and workable strategy, for dealing with Iron Age and Roman rural settlement.
The project, as with most Monument Protection Programme work, is based on data held by Sites and Monuments Records. This provides relatively few criteria for distinguishing between classes of site, especially on sites where there is no excavation evidence. A robust typology therefore needs to be able to cope with this variable quality, while creating opportunities to take advantage of better information as it becomes available. The project therefore starts with a simple but comprehensive assessment of the size, distribution, and nature of the available resource, using baseline data from Sites and Monuments Records on all probable Iron Age and Roman rural settlements, to establish an approximate idea of the size of the resource, its distribution, and how it has been recorded. In particular this baseline gives an indication of the consistency or otherwise of recorded criteria and the range of classifications used. Although far from complete or ideal, this approach provides a control against which to judge more detailed assessments carried out in later stages of the project.
The baseline survey is well underway, producing a database and national maps of the distribution, date, method of recording (form), and type classifications used for somewhere in the region of 60,000-75,000 sites. It includes a framework that records five key sets of information about settlements under five main research criteria: architecture, morphology and layout, industry, agriculture and environment, and ceremony and religion. The database is designed to incorporate information from sites where only survey data or information from aerial photographs were available, so that any classification developed could take into account the great majority of sites recorded only in this way. Thus, for an excavated site, morphological information is recorded both from the excavation and any surviving air photographs, earthwork, or geophysical survey evidence that is available.
Because of this baseline database, some of the biases, strengths, and weaknesses in the existing records are already becoming apparent, and it is becoming possible by linking baseline information with professional judgement and knowledge of Sites and Monuments Records staff to pinpoint areas of scant and very good information. Studying the relationship between particular forms of information and past archaeological work enables the identification of some of the areas where patterns and forms of settlement are likely to be more, or less, reliably understood. Once this framework was established it was then important to produce a national assessment of the record of settlement for the period using a series of case studies that could be carried out within the time frame of the current project. There are three case studies.
The first is designed to examine the baseline data for sites with a significant amount of excavated evidence. Once located, the bibliographic sources for these sites are used to record the five key sets of information in order to provide a national overview of detailed information about settlement. The sample is biased to areas of past research, but it is a manageable data set that will provide a good test bed for assessing the criteria chosen for study, and a useful way of assessing biases in existing archaeological knowledge and thus guide us about future priorities for research. This detailed survey of sites that have been excavated will probably produce a national database of some 4-5000 sites. Linking this information with the baseline survey data it is already possible to point to distinctive regional patterns of settlement that will form part of the wider national overview. Settlement morphology and architecture seem to provide a promising initial settlement classification with other headings pulling out important additional distinctions within these forms, both locally and nationally.
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The second case study focuses on sites with primarily or solely morphological information. These form a high proportion of the total number of potential Iron Age and Roman settlements nationally and are already subject to investigation within the broader framework of the National Mapping Programme. Within the current project, however, the aim has been to see how National Mapping Programme records could be adapted to make possibel rapid assessment of settlement within the methodology described here. To do this the project is currently looking at a small number of sample areas in which the National Mapping Programme or Sites and Monuments Record based records are assessed under the five criteria mentioned above. This part of the project is in its early stages, but preliminary work suggests that architectural and morphological information can be recorded that, when linked to the baseline and excavation data, provides a more informed guide to the main classes of settlement present, and possible examples of settlement forms as yet largely or wholly unrecorded through excavation.
The third case study is concerned with evidence recorded from surface collections and metal-detecting. This is a common source of information, particularly in the south and east of the country. The present project has been systematically recording the location, extent, methodology, and quality of recording of field surveys known to each Sites and Monuments Record in order to provide a survey of surveys. A small number of these are then selected to record systematically information under the five key criteria to demonstrate the data's potential for extending possible or probable classifications to sites about which we can otherwise say little or nothing. It is then also used to show how integrated aerial reconnaissance and field collection data can provide preliminary guides to the morphology, architecture, and chronology of many settlements over significant areas of the country.
The project was due to be completed, including the preparation of new Monument Class Descriptions supported by the database, by the end of 1998. Further analysis and dissemination of the results will then be contemplated.