The Late Roman Transition in the North: Papers from the Roman Archaeology Conference, Durham 1999

The wish of the editors was to bring together a number of individuals who had worked on evidence for the late Roman transition in north Britain in order to compare results, and to attempt to identify common ground, differences, and potential approaches for future research. In order to cover a range of views on the subject, the speakers included excavators (Ferris, Jones, Wilmott and Wilson), specialists in the areas of finds, ceramics, and environmental studies (Cool, Evans, Huntley and Stallibrass), and academics with a specialist interest in the late Roman transition (Dark and Esmonde-Cleary). The area studied is bisected by a national boundary, on each side of which archaeological agendas with different emphases are pursued, and the subject has been seen either as the end of the concern of the Romanist or the beginning of the concern of the medievalist. It is only in relatively recent years that the transition has been recognised widely as a separate study in its own right for which it is necessary to deploy evidence from a great variety of specialisms. As the papers presented here largely represent summaries of work in progress or overviews of work to date they are intended to provoke debate and hopefully act as a springboard for new work, both by the authors and others. Contents include: Transforming an Elite: Reinterpreting Late Roman Binchester by Iain Ferris and Rick Jones; The late Roman transition at Birdoswald and on Hadrian's Wall by Tony Wilmott; Cataractonium (Catterick): The end of a Roman town? by Pete Wilson; Coin Supply in the North in the late Roman period by R J Brickstock; The End of Roman Pottery in the North by Jeremy Evans; The parts left over: material culture into the fifth century by H E M Cool; Late Roman Transition in the North: the Palynological Evidence by Jacqueline P Huntley; How little we know, and how much there is to learn: what can animal and human bones tell us about the late Roman transition in northern England? by Sue Stallibrass; The Late Roman Transition in the North: a discussion Ken Dark; Summing Up by Simon Esmonde Cleary.