What’s on : Lectures

Excavations on the Iron Age and Roman town at Silchester: managing change in the 1st century AD

Lectures
Date
2 Nov 2009
Start time
7:30 PM
Venue
Tempest Anderson Hall
Speaker
Prof Michael Fulford
Excavations on the Iron Age and Roman town at Silchester: managing change in the 1st century AD

Event Information

Joint lecture with the York Archaeological Trust

Excavations on the Iron Age and Roman town at Silchester: managing change in the 1st century AD
Professor Michael Fulford FBA, FSA
Department of Archaeology, University of Reading

Excavations have been ongoing each summer since 1997 in insula IX to explore in detail the occupation of a typical insula of the Roman town (Calleva Atrebatum) from its origins in the late Iron Age to its abandonment between the mid-5th and the mid-7th Century AD. The lecture will review the progress and highlights of the project which has reached down to the 1st Century AD where it will focus on the fascinating evidence of the town’s response to the Roman occupation of Southern Britain.

Sponsored by York Archaeological Trust

Report
By Carole Smith

Calleva Atrebatum, or Silchester, abandoned after the Roman era, is a unique time capsule containing evidence of the transition from Iron Age culture to Roman. The Integrated Archaeological Database, developed at York, is proving a major interpretive tool in Reading University’s continuing excavations. After the invasion in 43AD, Silchester became the centre of Cogidubnus’ client kingdom. Around 60AD, the period of Boudicca’s burning of Colchester, London and St Albans, it was destroyed by fire. Rebuilt, its grid pattern was aligned at 45o to the original. Excavations show one new building aligned on the old grid and exhibiting both Roman and Iron Age elements: the latter a thatched round house at one end and a square one at the other containing embedded votive offerings of pots, human bones, the burnt bones of sheep, and stones from former buildings. This clinging to old ways is evocative of insecurity, and fear of major change.

 

Book

Michael Fulford is the co-author of the following book: