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earith Roman port gradually brought within the imperial estate by ‘bequest, intestacy or confiscation’, or as the official residences of imperial administrators. Quoting the terms known to have been used in the management of ‘public lands’ in Roman Africa, Salway concluded: it seems altogether more likely that this was ‘Crown land, let out to small tenants, under the general supervision of a procurator saltus [estate manager] responsible to the Emperor’s financial agent for the Province, the procurator provinciae.’ Hadrian visits Britain That imperial-estate model dominated archaeological thinking about the Fens for three decades. Thus, when the late Tim Potter excavated a massive stone building at the Fenland hamlet of Stonea in 1980-1984, he argued that it belonged to a time of massive expansion into the Fens in the wake of the Boudican Revolt. Roman military revenge-attacks on the territory of the Iceni left the region uninhabited, Potter argued, until its potential was recognised during Hadrian’s visit to Britain in AD 122. Roman Stonea was the result: a planned settlement established around AD 140 to serve as the administrative centre for the imperial estate. Divided by a grid of streets into blocks of thatched timber-houses, Stonea had an imposing building at the centre, with painted wall plaster, glazed windows, a tiled roof, and underfloor heating, probably of several storeys, raised above the surrounding Fens to symbolise Roman power. Stonea had a marketplace and a temple to Minerva, and the bone evidence from the site suggested that the Stonea community lived by rearing sheep and exporting the meat. above The sheer complexity and scale of the site is revealed by this plan of all the features (largely consisting of beam-slots, post-holes, ditches, and gullies). Solid black indicates the position of sections and area excavations; red indicates the site of large middens. New evidence challenges the theory Like so many ideas about the character of Roman Britain, the imperial-estate model has come under attack in recent years. The Fenland Survey, completed in 1989, and the results of more recent developer-funded archaeology have added more than 2,000 new sites to the map, including more than 300 Roman and Iron Age salt-production locations. This shows that the Fens ceased to be ‘virgin territory’ from the Bronze Age: this always was a densely occupied and intensively farmed landscape, with settlements on every available dry island of gravel in the peat fen. The idea of a centrally planned Roman landscape has given way to the far more complex picture of change in response to environmental opportunities and constraints – such as falling and rising sea levels – rather than imperial decree. Throughout the 1st and 2nd centuries, new land was gradually drained and colonised, small below Key to the distribution of Fenland produce is the Car Dyke, though the jury is still out on whether this was created as a canal, or whether it is a drainage system that happens to be navigable in parts by shallow-drafted punts. 30 current archaeology | www.archaeology.co.uk October 2014 |
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farmsteads become larger and more nucleated in time, some sites were reorganised and some abandoned. The large number of salt-production sites suggests small-scale private enterprises and a great variety of modes of production rather than one large imperial-run factory. When Jeremy Taylor, author of An Atlas of Roman Rural Settlement in England (2007), came to review the Fenland, he concluded that even the roads and canals, such as Fen Causeway and Car Dyke, were not grand imperial projects but localised improvements to an existing network of roads and waterways creating and maintaining links between the dense pattern of Fen-edge settlements and ensuring access to the sea. Some archaeologists have even questioned whether Car Dyke is a canal at all, given that it has a number of sharp bends over its 122km length (between the River Cam, near Horningsea in Cambridgeshire, and the River Witham, at Lincoln). The waterway is interrupted at regular intervals by gravel causeways, deliberately built and supported by wooden stakes, providing crossing points linked to trackways. Though submerged at a depth of about 1m, these causeways could be a serious impediment to the progress of barges or boats, though not perhaps to the shallowdrafted punts or lighters known to have been used on canals in northern Europe at this time. Excavating Camp Ground Against this background of debate about the character of the Roman Fenland, Christopher Evans and his team have looked to see what the very rich evidence from the Camp Ground might have to say about these big themes. The site itself is extraordinarily complex, a palimpsest of ditches, gullies, banks, causeways, and post-holes so dense that they cover 50 per cent or more of the excavated area. Phasing and untangling them has been a major achievement, as has processing more than 125,000 finds. The best way that Christopher Evans can find to describe the task of trying to distinguish meaningful phasing from the labyrinthine character of the settlement’s many ditches is to say that ‘it comes close to trying to name constellations amid the myriad night-sky stars’. Order does being to emerge, however, with the earliest occupation at the site dating from the Late Iron Age, represented by three ditched enclosures, six roundhouses, and a small square building, possibly a shrine. Whereas other Late | Issue 295 above Barge channels or slipways in the northwest of the site, partly overlain by the timbers of Structure 68. Iron Age settlements along the same gravel terrace were abandoned in the decades straddling the BC/AD divide, Iron Age activity at the Camp Ground continued into the first half of the 1st century AD. It is possible that Camp Ground absorbed nearby populations to become the leading settlement on the terrace. The site had a mixed arable and pastoral economy, rearing cattle, sheep, and horse. Overlying this Late Iron Age and Early Roman phase is an open agricultural landscape with a track (the West Track), and a series of square and rectangular enclosures. Intriguingly, there is environmental evidence for the sudden cessation of sedimentation at this period in the nearby lake, which did not fill in gradually, but was deliberately drained. In the next phase, AD 120-180, a new road (the East Road) is cut through the site. A ladder-like pattern of small enclosures is aligned on the road, with pits, wells, and watering holes, and the post-holes and beam-slots of timber buildings. There is clear evidence of spatial planning, and of  Owen : G mage www.archaeology.co.uk | current archaeology 31

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earith Roman port gradually brought within the imperial estate by ‘bequest, intestacy or confiscation’, or as the official residences of imperial administrators.

Quoting the terms known to have been used in the management of ‘public lands’ in Roman Africa, Salway concluded: it seems altogether more likely that this was ‘Crown land, let out to small tenants, under the general supervision of a procurator saltus [estate manager] responsible to the Emperor’s financial agent for the Province, the procurator provinciae.’

Hadrian visits Britain

That imperial-estate model dominated archaeological thinking about the Fens for three decades. Thus, when the late Tim Potter excavated a massive stone building at the Fenland hamlet of Stonea in 1980-1984, he argued that it belonged to a time of massive expansion into the Fens in the wake of the Boudican Revolt. Roman military revenge-attacks on the territory of the Iceni left the region uninhabited, Potter argued, until its potential was recognised during Hadrian’s visit to Britain in AD 122.

Roman Stonea was the result: a planned settlement established around AD 140 to serve as the administrative centre for the imperial estate. Divided by a grid of streets into blocks of thatched timber-houses, Stonea had an imposing building at the centre, with painted wall plaster, glazed windows,

a tiled roof, and underfloor heating, probably of several storeys, raised above the surrounding Fens to symbolise Roman power. Stonea had a marketplace and a temple to Minerva, and the bone evidence from the site suggested that the Stonea community lived by rearing sheep and exporting the meat.

above The sheer complexity and scale of the site is revealed by this plan of all the features (largely consisting of beam-slots, post-holes, ditches, and gullies). Solid black indicates the position of sections and area excavations; red indicates the site of large middens.

New evidence challenges the theory

Like so many ideas about the character of Roman Britain, the imperial-estate model has come under attack in recent years. The Fenland Survey, completed in 1989, and the results of more recent developer-funded archaeology have added more than 2,000 new sites to the map, including more than 300 Roman and Iron Age salt-production locations. This shows that the Fens ceased to be ‘virgin territory’ from the Bronze Age: this always was a densely occupied and intensively farmed landscape, with settlements on every available dry island of gravel in the peat fen.

The idea of a centrally planned Roman landscape has given way to the far more complex picture of change in response to environmental opportunities and constraints – such as falling and rising sea levels – rather than imperial decree. Throughout the 1st and 2nd centuries, new land was gradually drained and colonised, small below Key to the distribution of Fenland produce is the Car Dyke, though the jury is still out on whether this was created as a canal, or whether it is a drainage system that happens to be navigable in parts by shallow-drafted punts.

30

current archaeology | www.archaeology.co.uk

October 2014 |

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