The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain: an online resource

This resource brings together the excavated evidence for the rural settlement of Roman Britain with the over-arching aim to inform a comprehensive reassessment of the countryside of Roman Britain. It includes both traditionally published reports and 'grey literature' reports from developer-funded excavations since 1990.

The project arose from pilot projects undertaken by Cotswold Archaeology1 and funded by Historic England and it began in 2012. It is funded by grants from the Leverhulme Trust to the Universities of Reading and York (ADS)2 and from Historic England to Cotswold Archaeology.3
Phase 1 (April 2015) publishes the settlement evidence from Roman England. Subsequent phases will add Roman Wales (by December 2015) and the related finds, environmental and burial data (by 1st April 2017). These will be used alongside the specific site data in a series of integrative studies on rural settlement, economy, people and ritual to be published by the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies as Britannia Monographs between 2016 and 2018.

Roman England includes some 3,482 reports, the vast majority of which were produced since the implementation of PPG 16 in 1990. However the project has reached back and includes some sites published as early as 1808. Each site is described with bibliographic entries, as well as information on chronology, settlement type and morphological form. The project has not included all investigations, such as watching briefs and small-scale evaluations producing Roman evidence, but has limited its scope to those that have yielded plan, chronology and quantified finds data susceptible of characterisation and synthesis. The cut-off for inclusion here is publication before 31st December 2014.
'Grey Literature': with the agreement of the parties concerned, all the grey literature reports accessed for this project have been scanned and made available through the ADS.