New Visions of the Countryside of Roman Britain: The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain

It has often been stated that Roman Britain was quintessentially a rural society, with the vast majority of the population living and working in the countryside. Yet there was clearly a large degree of regional variation, and with the huge mass of new data produced since the onset of developer-funded archaeology in 1990, the incredible diversity of Roman rural settlement across the landscape can now be demonstrated. A new regional framework for the study of rural Roman Britain is proposed, in which a rich characterisation has been developed of the mosaic of communities that inhabited the province and the way that they changed over time. Centre stage is the farmstead, rather than the villa, which has for so long dominated discourse in the study of Roman Britain; variations in farmstead type, building form and associated landscape context are all explored in order to breathe new life into our understanding of the Romano-British countryside.