Silchester: Changing Visions of a Roman Town

Integrating geophysics and archaeology: the results of the Silchester mapping project 2005-10

John Creighton author Robert Fry author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

Published:31st Jul '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Silchester: Changing Visions of a Roman Town cover

This volume draws together for the first time all the fieldwork known to have taken place from the earliest located trenches in the 1720s up until the modern campaigns of Fulford. It integrates this work with a new geophysical survey of 217ha to provide a new overarching narrative for the town.

The volume starts with a historiography of work on the city from earliest antiquarian investigations. This sense of changing interpretations of the site permeates all the later discussion, showing how new discoveries have transformed understandings. The core of the volume contains the empirical data, mapping the past excavations alongside evidence from aerial photography, fieldwalking, LiDAR and geophysics. The final sections provide essays in interpretation, with thematic reviews of: the defenses; the development of the oppidum; the military connection; the mortuary landscape; trade and industry; and pubic entertainment. Finally a narrative overview examines how the town’s remains have been interpreted within an historical setting.

In many senses the volume under review offers an update of [Boon’s] important and thoroughly readable book, bringing a weight of evidence and research that has been accumulated over the last 40 years on Silchester’s archaeology that Boon lacked… the quality and number of illustrations in this volume is of the highest standard and visually make handling the book a treat. * Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society *

ISBN: 9780907764427

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

448 pages