Roman Britain, Rome In Britain: Cultural Integration And Integrity In The Age Of Empire
Description
This thesis seeks to explore the various ways in which the inhabitants of Britain adapted, adopted, or ignored Roman culture from the second century BC to the fifth century AD, covering the periods before, during, and after Roman rule. The first chapter will briefly discuss current scholarly approaches to the spread of Roman culture and the provincial expression of “Romanness” in Roman studies. In the second chapter, I look at concepts, materials, animals, and people who arrived from elsewhere in the Roman world and what they brought to Britain. The third chapter makes up the bulk of this thesis and is divided into sections organized by time period; it explores various native British expressions of Roman culture, which differed from region to region, displaying the diversity of Britain in the Roman period. It also addresses the question of whether or not Roman culture was a “thin veneer” that vanished quickly after the Roman withdrawal in AD 410 and comes to the conclusion that by the fifth century it was an integral part of British life in the former province. The final chapter sums up the material discussed in the preceding chapters. In order to best explore this subject, I have looked primarily at archaeological research of Britain in the Roman period, along with the relevant primary source literature and relevant secondary material, including theoretical approaches to globalization, imperialism, post-colonialism, and the so-called “Romanization paradigm.” In this thesis I will use the above to form, as much as possible given the limitations of the available evidence, a coherent narrative of British expressions of both Roman and British culture during the Roman period.