Research frameworks have been much in vogue of late due to the emphasis placed upon them by the national archaeological agencies. Their aim is to establish the current state of knowledge about a particular region or period and then formulate further research priorities. The rationale for this approach lies in the current system of contract archaeology in the UK where anyone can work anywhere, and so an archaeological contractor working in an area for the first time is unlikely to have the depth of local knowledge to quickly identify the key research questions to which the investigation of any given site might contribute. Research frameworks, therefore, help to bring people up to speed, and to date most effort has been devoted to study on a regional level. It is therefore unusual to find a volume devoted to a single site, for while this report covers an 18 km2 study area, this is simply to provide contextualisation for Fishbourne, and indeed the origin of the project lay in the desire to formulate priorities for the future investigation of the complex. While this study area has logic for the late Iron Age and Roman periods, it is less clear why the decision was made to include consideration of the archaeology for all periods from the Palaeolithic to medieval. The study also includes Chichester, although less space is devoted to it than to Fishbourne. The authors do, however, cast some doubt on Alec Down's interpretation of the timber structures at Chapel Street as part of a Conquest-period military establishment, although they are less clear on what alternative interpretation should be preferred. Much remains to be learnt about Chichester, although the opportunities to undertake excavation on the scale required to provide some of the answers to the questions posed here will be rare indeed.
Fishbourne is one of the great archaeological sites of Britain, and one which has been particularly susceptible to investigation through excavation. Its significance needs no elaboration or restatement. The authors steer away from making detailed recommendations on where future investigation should occur, instead concentrating on the identification of broad research themes, with a particular emphasis (bias?) towards the need to investigate and identify further the nature of pre-a.d. 43 activity at the site. Rather than proposing an immediate start to new excavation, however, the two activities they identify as having greatest value are the potential to get more value from the archives of previously published investigations, and the need to analyse properly and publish the results of several unpublished interventions in the vicinity of the palace. Such is the quality of Cunliffe's published account, and the inherent interest in the site, that alternative interpretations of his original sequence and dating are still being proposed (most recently by Ernest Black and Miles Russell), and one imagines that more could probably now be wrung from fresh study of the artefacts and ecofacts. Turning to the second priority, it is manifestly unacceptable that excavations to the east of the palace by the defunct Southern Archaeology in the 1990s remain unpublished, and there is a pressing need for this material to be adequately analysed and disseminated.
Not all of the area around the palace is scheduled, and it is conceivable that in the future proposals will come forward for development to the east and north of it. It is precisely in these areas that there is the prospect of finding first-century deposits relatively unencumbered by later structures, and thus addressing the question of just what was happening at Fishbourne prior to, and immediately after, the summer of a.d. 43. Was there a Roman military presence in support of the friendly king prior to the Claudian invasion, or was this a Gallic trading depot, or indeed did it have some other function of which we as yet suspect little? Indeed, if the circumstances of the discovery of the palace tell us anything, it is that in an area such as this we should expect the unexpected, and that when startling discoveries are made, excavators should not be afraid to tear up the existing framework and go with the evidence, wherever that takes them. Easy to say of course, but much harder to achieve.
