Villas Sanctuaries And Settlement In The Romano British Countryside

This volume brings together a range of papers on buildings that have been categorised as ‘villas’, mainly in Roman Britain, from the Isle of Wight to Shropshire. It comprises the first such survey for almost half a century.

A collection of nine papers by leading experts in Romano-British archaeology who examine the economic links between the villa and the Roman world.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval. The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

This interdisciplinary edited volume presents twelve papers by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing the interconnected relationship between religion and the Roman economy over the period c. 500 BC to AD 350. The connection between Roman religion and the economy has largely been ignored in work on the Roman economy, but this volume explores the many complex ways in which economic and religious thinking and activities were interwoven, from individuals to institutions. The broad geographic and chronological scope of the volume engages with a notable variety of evidence: epigraphic, archaeological, historical, papyrological, and zooarchaeological. In addition to providing case studies that draw from the rich archaeological, documentary, and epigraphic evidence, the volume also explores the different and sometimes divergent pictures offered by these sources (from discrepancies in the cost of religious buildings, to the tensions between piety and ostentatious donation). The edited collection thus bridges economic, social, and religious themes. The volume provides a view of a society in which religion had a central role in economic activity on an institutional to individual scale. The volume allows an evaluation of impact of that activity from both financial and social viewpoints, providing a new perspective on Roman religion - a perspective to which a wide range of archaeological and documentary evidence, from animal bone to coins and building costs, has contributed. As a result, this volume not only provides new information on the economy of Roman religion: it also proposes new ways of looking at existing bodies of evidence.

By far the majority of the population of the province of Roman Britain lived in the countryside - in smallholdings, small villages and villas ranging from small houses to extravagantly appointed rural seats. This book looks at the evidence for life in the countryside in Roman Britain - through buildings, objects and the undeniable impact of the Roman army - and examines how it changed through the 400 years of Roman rule.