It has often been stated that Roman Britain was fundamentally 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 mass of new data produced since the onset of developer-funded archaeology in 1990, the diversity of Roman rural settlement across the landscape can now be demonstrated.
The Roman Rural Settlement Project was based at University of Reading and ran from 2012 to 2018. It utilised data from thousands of primarily developer-funded excavations to propose a new regional framework for the study of rural Roman Britain, in which was developed a rich characterisation of the mosaic of communities that inhabited the province and the way that they changed over time.
This talk will present an overview of this project, discussing patterns in areas such as settlement, agriculture and ritual practices.
A key output of the project has been the online resource hosted by the Archaeology Data Service with detailed data on over 2,500 Roman rural settlements.
These can be interrogated at:
http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/romangl/’