Improving our understanding of Londinium

Abstract

Our extensive knowledge of Roman London is the result of over four decades of large-scale excavation. In the UK, the establishment and growth of professional archaeology since the 1970s, coupled with the funding provided by property developers since 1990 (Fulford & Holbrook 2015), has transformed our understanding of both urban and rural sites—and nowhere more so than London. A combination of intensive building development in the City of London and the world-leading technical quality of many of the excavations means that Londinium is now probably both the most extensively and best-excavated major town of the Roman world. Knowledge generated by these excavations, however, has not always been made available through publications as it should have been. Although there is an important archive in which the records of past projects are curated, how and where to publish results has been a long-running problem, especially for the excavations of the 1970s and 1980s where post-excavation work was often not properly funded or supported. One major project to publish a synthesis of work on such sites in Southwark, south of the Thames, did result in a series of important volumes (Sidell et al. 2002; Cowan 2003; Hammer 2003; Yule 2005; Cowan et al. 2009), but a programme designed to provide systematic coverage of such projects in the City of London, to the north of the river (Maloney 1990; Perring & Roskams 1991; Williams 1993; Davis et al. 1994), failed to produce one of the five volumes promised—that concerning the archaeology of the key eastern hill. We also lack any up-to-date synthesis, a problem only partly compensated for by Dominic Perring's (1991) popular overview and Wallace's (2014) in-depth analysis of the evidence for the period down to the Boudiccan revolt in AD 60/61.

Roman London's First Voices. Writing tablets from the Bloomberg excavations, 2010–14, by Roger S.O. Tomlin , 2016. London: Museum of London Archaeology; ISBN 978-1-907586-40-8 hardback £32; xv+309 pp., 144 b/w and colour illus.

“…WT 52, for example, may be particularly ripe for detailed digital investigations. There have also already been alternative suggestions for understanding the texts as currently transcribed, for example WT 29 in Bowman's (2016) TLS review and WT 59 in that of Millett (2016). Opportunities also abound for linguists to study a chronologically restricted corpus in order to continue to build on our understanding of imperial Latin language and orthography and to explore the precise nature of letter forms.…”