The Making of Britain's First Urban Landscapes: The Case of Late Iron Age and Roman Essex

Pitts, Martin; Perring, Dominic

doi:10.3815/000000006784016585

Cited by 20 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The contrast between the two styles of consumption could not have been greater than at Claudio-Neronian Colchester (AD 49-60), where intra-site analysis of pottery deposition has shown that the inhabitants of the oppidum at post-conquest Sheepen preferred to consume in a manner emphasizing large Gallic drinking vessels, despite access to the material culture of the Roman colonists at Head Street, who eschewed Gallo-Belgic imports in favor of a template of consumption based around dining (Pitts and Perring 2006). It is notable that the 'urban' assemblage with the most statistical similarity with the LPRIA settlements is from the short-lived fortress at Head Street (ColH 3 on Fig.…”

Section: Post-conquest Settlements C Ad 40-200mentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Bourdieu, 1984). Further details of the previous use of the technique with pottery assemblages (Pitts, 2005a(Pitts, ,b,2007aPitts and Perring, 2006) and in the study of the globalization of modern food distribution and consumption can be found elsewhere (Pitts et al, 2007). CA is related to the more popular method of principal components analysis, with the main difference being that CA is better suited to the analysis of categorical variables (e.g.…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 98%

“…However, to fully address the local impact of globalizing trends, more detailed analysis of pottery deposition in domestic and funerary contexts is included to provide further understanding of the role of pottery in social practice. Whilst the general methodological approach outlined here has been applied previously by the author to individual sites (Pitts and Perring 2006;Pitts, 2007a) and periods (Pitts, 2005a,b), this study represents the first sustained attempt to integrate all such data to address the wider complexities of globalizing processes at work in the study region.…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Globalizing the local in Roman Britain: An anthropological approach to social change

Pitts

2008

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

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Section: Post-conquest Settlements C Ad 40-200mentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Globalizing the local in Roman Britain: An anthropological approach to social change

Pitts

2008

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

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“…Moreover, Roman town planning was not simply down to surveying, engineering and mathematics but involved a variety of rituals and ceremonies in the landscape (Creighton, 2000: 209-13;Pitts and Perring, 2006;Rykwert, 1976: 44-60;Woodward and Woodward, 2004). A town should not be considered simply in terms of a physical entity but as a place that is shaped, invented and conceptualized by social actors over time (Lefebvre, 1991: 73) and, in Britain at least, this is likely to have been influenced by meaning-laden space in the pre-Roman period.…”

Section: ■ Studying the Roman Town And Its Location In Britainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious place and its interaction with urbanization in the Roman era

Rogers

2008

Journal of Social Archaeology

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This article examines the issue of urbanization in Roman Britain and its interaction with places of the late pre-Roman Iron Age. Many of these places were complex and highly meaning-laden landscapes and often incorporated ritually imbued watery locations as well as culturally significant activities. The modern western conception of place differs vastly from the past when places were important ways of conceptualizing, experiencing and understanding the world and they were constructed through human action, memory and experience and interaction. 'Landscape' is largely a modern term and may be inadequate for attempting to understand place and space in the past. The location of Roman towns in Britain has often been considered predominantly in strategic, economic and practical terms but they will also have been interacting with pre-Roman places, which in turn may have gone on to influence the nature of urbanism itself.

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“…As a great deal of literature attests, 26 it is problematic to draw direct correlations between static artefacts and the dynamic, shifting, and multifaceted process of the elaboration of identity. 25 Pitts and Perring 2006;Perring and Pitts 2013, 232-38. This is especially pertinent to the debate over urban origins.…”

Section: Britain's First Towns: Scholarship and Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering Britain's first urban communities

Pitts¹

2014

J. Roman archaeol.

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Questions about the foundation and cultural make-up of Britain's first towns have been long debated. The creation of new cities was a crucial element in the economic and cultural assimilation of a new province, having ramifications for the trajectories of later generations as well as the immediate situation following the conquest. A dominant feature of the debate about urban origins in Britain is the interpretation of evidence relating to buildings and urban morphology, whereas the contribution of the evidence from finds has arguably been minimal. My intent here is to review the historical scenario of the foundation of Britain's first towns in light of artefactual evidence. I will focus on the evidence of Claudio-Neronian brooches and imported finewares (and their predecessors), which have already contributed to the debate as chronological indicators but perhaps offer more potential for new insights into cultural connectivity and social practice. 11 Creighton 2006, 130-35. 12 Creighton 2006, 94 and 125; cf. Millett 1994, 433. 13 Perring 2011, 250-51. The basis for Perring's theory is the discovery of an enclosure of c.24.5 ha defined by V-shaped double-ditches, rapidly constructed and dismantled in the late Claudian period, as well as dendrochronological dates for bridge structures on the Cornhill site of no later than A.D. 48, where a rectangular street grid was established before the revolt of A.D. 60/61. 14 Wallace 2013 presents a detailed counter-argument. 15 Aldhouse-Green 2007, 381; cf. Burnham et al. 2001, 71. 16 Goldsworthy and Haynes 1999.Reconsidering Britain's first urban communities 135 Artefactual perspectivesTo address the question of who lived in Britain's first towns, a rather different perspective comes when attention is shifted from structures to artefacts. Admittedly, this is a story that is less easy to tell or visualise, requiring no small amount of work to produce clear narratives from the detailed specialist analyses conducted on different categories of finds. Nevertheless, progress is being made. For example, comparative analysis of Claudio-Neronian material from the colonia at Colchester and the pre-existing Sheepen site revealed new insights into the cultural geography of the landscape around Colchester. 17 Here, a marked difference in assemblages between the two contemporary locations implies entrenched discrepancies in pottery supply and use after the conquest, 18 highlighting the likelihood of two culturally-distinct communities at Colchester. This observation is further reinforced by the integration of faunal and brooch data, with contextually defined 'suites' of material emerging, one relating to the veteran colonists, the other linked to the indigenous population. 19 To complicate matters, a fuller consideration of the finds suggests the spatial segregation of military/colonial and pre-existing communities within Claudio-Neronian Sheepen itself (between compounds 1 and 2, respectively, of R. Niblett's excavations). 20 The implications of this research are twofold. In the first pl...

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The Making of Britain's First Urban Landscapes: The Case of Late Iron Age and Roman Essex

Cited by 20 publications

References 22 publications

Globalizing the local in Roman Britain: An anthropological approach to social change

Globalizing the local in Roman Britain: An anthropological approach to social change

Religious place and its interaction with urbanization in the Roman era

Reconsidering Britain's first urban communities

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