- Chapter Eight -
One of the commonest approaches to the problem of native and Roman interac-
tion in Britain has been to adopt a somewhat myopic perspective, often against the
backcloth of Britain's own colonial and imperial past. This has usually had the effect
of (i) treating Roman Britain as a chronological package in relative isolation from
the pre-existing native background; (ii) giving undue prominence to the limited his-
torical sources at the expense of the archaeological; (iii) seeing 'change' as a direct
consequence of the Roman presence, and equating it with notions of civilization and
improvement; and (iv) giving undue attention to the visible superstructure of
romanization, the roads, towns, villas and so on, as evidence of acculturation to a
Roman ideal (d. Barrett 1989: 235-6). Thus the conquest in AD 43 heralded signif-
icant change (d. Salway 1981; Frere 1987). Towns emerged out of the civil settle-
ments spawned by military sites, their subsequent elaboration as centres of
administration with the appropriate public buildings and amenities being guaran-
teed by military assistance and government encouragement. Money and taxation
facilitated the growth of towns and the appearance of a developed economic
infrastructure based around a full market economy, accompanied by intensified
economic, industrial and specialized productive capacity and the widespread
appearance of shops and workshops and of extensive distributions of goods in town
and country. Villas, too, formed part of this socio-economic symbiosis, acting as the
centres of large, profitable estates along classical lines involved in specialized pro-
duction for new markets and for the army and as a focus for change in agriculture
and the countryside. Parallel developments also occurred in religion, art, language,
culture and dress.
Such an approach necessarily focused excavation and research on the visible Roman
superstructure at the expense of the native. More importantly, the emphasis lay on
'change' within the Roman period, facilitated by a number of factors, most of them of
Roman origin or external to the province (d. Salway 1981: 505-16; Frere 1987: 296):
(i) the presence of a large army and a retinue of specialists and followers; (ii) the pres-
ence of traders, merchants and entrepreneurs; (iii) the establishment of model colonies
and other islands of romanization; (iv) the intervention of influential governors,
like Agricola, or emperors, like Hadrian; (v) the activities of influential rulers like
Cogidubnus and, to a lesser extent, the elite of the newly emerging civitates; (vi) the
spread of the Latin language and Roman law. Surprisingly little attention was paid
in this to the existing native infrastructure, nor the reasons behind the apparent
'backwardness' of the north and west of the province.
This approach to native and Roman interaction has come under scrutiny in the
last fifteen years or so, not least from a generation of post-imperial scholars with
different world perspectives. This has caused some extreme reactions, especially in
north Africa, where a particular brand of 'decolonized' history written by African
scholars has emphasised resistance, both military and civilian, to the Roman presence
(Benabou 1976); by contrast in the north-west provinces, and especially in Britain,
recent work has seen a greater emphasis on the way in which native societies
adapted to the proximity of Rome and to eventual assimilation within the empire.
Romanization is now seen less as a one-way than as a two-way process (Figure 8.4).
The publication of Burnham and Johnson (1979) was an important turning
point, followed by Blagg and King (1984), Millett (1990) and Jones (199Ic); this is