Place: beyond beginnings and endings

The late Roman phases of towns were part of a process of recurring and simultaneous continuity and change from earlier periods. A concentration on the scientifics of space in many studies of the past has neglected the importance of place, which can help in understanding towns and change over time (E. Casey 1996:14). Places can be considered as entities that gather people, experiences, histories, and thoughts, and keep them to influence later action and feeling; they are bodies of collection and recollection. Ingold (2000: 149) sees places as being composed of the vitality that animates their inhabitants. Linear time may also not be so useful for understanding all aspects of places: the present in places gathers the past and future into itself and is not segregated from them (Ingold 1993: 159). Places are generative and regenerative in their own right and do not age according to any pre-established schedule of growth and decline, such as the historical events of the later Roman period (cf. E. Casey 1996: 24-6). Roman towns gathered people in deeply acculturated ways but, as we have seen, in Roman Britain and elsewhere they were also located on sites with longer histories. Roman towns were highly ritualised places and in the late Roman period would have continued to draw on the significance of the places from earlier periods. The role of memories and myths that places contained is an important area to study for reconsidering the decline of towns in the late Roman period.

Memories and myths relating to places and landscapes in Roman Britain require more attention on a general level, and it is something that is now receiving more analysis in prehistoric studies, especially in relation to concepts of time and identity (e. g., Lucas 2005; Murray 1999; Thomas 1996) and the use by people in later prehistoric times of earlier monuments (e. g., Gosden and Lock 1998; Lock, Gosden, and Daly 2005; Miles et al. 2003). Hingley (2009) has demonstrated that Bronze Age bronze objects were sometimes deliberately incorporated into activity levels of Iron Age date on sites that often had a preexisting monumentality. He suggests that the objects may have been used as part of the commemoration of place and incorporated ideas of the mythical past into the context of the present. Gosden and Lock (1998) have argued that all societies will have been influenced by mythical and real pasts that affected the way in which continuities and change took place in the present. Most work has focused on prehistory but the arguments are equally valid for the Roman period. Ancient artefacts could be received and reinterpreted in later periods of the past, but public buildings and other structures of the Roman period can also be interpreted in terms of structural material culture (cf. Gardner 2007: 97-114) that were used, repaired, and reformed over time. The sites of Roman towns had long sequences of use before and during, and also after, the Roman period. Van Dyke and Alcock (2003: 5) write of ‘places that have been inscribed with meaning, usually as a result of some past event or attachment’ that continued to attract attention and activity. This might be one way of viewing towns and their importance in the later Roman period. Whilst drawing on the past, however, towns were also being used in innovative and transformative ways, continuing the dynamic nature of the places.

Memory is 'something vital to our understanding of the ancient world’ (Alcock 2002:1); it is the central medium through which identities are constituted - we are shaped by the past (Olick and Robbins 1998:112). The issue of memory in Roman archaeology is a topic that could still benefit from more attention despite it generally being difficult to study from archaeological material. One approach is to use documentary evidence to support the material (cf. Alcock 2002: 2), but this can be biased towards particular viewpoints and has limitations in areas in which few texts exist.

An analysis of the role of memory within society over time suggests that social memory - shared remembrance - would have played an important part in the construction of identity in the Roman period, providing both an image of the past and direction for the future (Alcock 2002: 1; Fentress and Wickham 1992: 8; Le Goff 1992). Today, it could be argued that memory is often related more to the personal than the social and there has been a general devaluation of memory as a source of knowledge (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 8). Social memory is articulated through speech, performances, and ceremonies (Fentress and Wickham 1992:47; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003:4). Rituals also created and reinforced memories within society and passed information on. Memories are generated along the paths of movement that each person lays down in the course of his or her life (Ingold 2000: 139, 147) - this is intimately connected to the way in which the ‘land’ is lived and contributes to the long-term place-value of sites. Agency is also important, because individuals and groups would have had different memories and different motives in the creation of these memories.

Place, including the built environment and ‘natural’ places (cf. Insoll 2007), is an important arena in which memories are created and in which the society is structured and reproduced. Giddens’ theory of structuration (1984) argued that routinely performed activities created the knowledge and memory of how to go on; it reproduced the society through time. The individual becomes socialised within the culture of the group whilst at the same time the group and its cultural values are reproduced (ibid.). For Tilley (2004: 12) it is also the individual who carries time into the experience of places, and his (1994) study of prehistoric monuments argued that the experience of walking along the Dorset Cursus monument was an essential ingredient of its meaning. Barrett (1988) sought to apply structuration theory to archaeological evidence, and it has been useful in studies of architecture and the organisation and layout of buildings in many periods of archaeology (e. g., Graves 2000; M. Johnson 2002).1 For the Roman period, Favro (1996) has explored the Forum Romanum of Augustan Rome and the ways in which the architecture and use of space was carefully choreographed, movement controlled, and experience manipulated, creating the meaning of the site. Buildings act as ‘curtains around space’ (Boman 2003: 207), framing the spaces and directing the action. The involvement of people is also necessary and adds to the significance of the places; as Casey said, ‘bodies build places’ (E. Casey 1993: 116).

People living within towns in the later Roman period may well have possessed a genealogical understanding of the origins of these places (cf. Hingley 2009:157) for which no written records now exist but that will have been represented in their continued actions, behaviours, and experiences of the places. That these large towns were comparatively rare in Roman Britain may also have contributed to the special nature of these places and their

1 Graves (2000) sees social space as created out of social practice within physical space. Johnson’s (2002) study of medieval and renaissance castles in England considered them in terms of‘active and complex pieces of landscape and material culture’.

Significance in social memory. As bodies of structural material culture, towns are hugely complex sets of data, the product of the activities of many individuals over long periods of time. This will also have been recognised by the inhabitants of these places in the later Roman period, and it may well have been a positive factor adding to the importance of these places.

The architectural framing of place applies as much to 'ruins’ as it does to well-maintained structures, as Edensor’s (2005) study of industrial ruins indicates. Edensor argues that the importance of ruins has generally been ignored because of the predominant capitalist notion within society of the economic value of space: 'ruins and other forms of wasteland are tarnished by their association with economic decline’ (ibid.: 7, i66). Ruined space is often seen as somewhere where nothing happens, but Edensor highlights the many varied uses of the buildings and the ways in which the space was comprehended. In his terms, ruins are 'haunted by a horde of absent presences, a series of signs of the past that cannot be categorised but intuitively grasped’ (ibid.: 152). Activities with late Roman public buildings too were not simply taking advantage of deserted buildings but were placed and organised within them in meaningful ways, as in the case of the metalworking in the basilica at Silchester (Fulford and Timby 2000: 72).

Beyond the public buildings, the towns as a whole were places where movement, encounter, assembly, experience, and memory were significant factors in the creation of meaning. Towns were still places with sizeable populations in the late Roman period, which drew people from outside. Some of the public buildings retained official functions, despite also becoming centres of other activities and some parts of their structures being demolished. There were changes in the organisation of towns, in some cases moving away from the classical style of urbanism, but these need not be translated as decline. Other settlement types such as small towns, for example, became prosperous and densely populated without adopting the classical style.