Of all the Later Iron Age sites identified as British oppida, Bagendon in Gloucestershire has, until recently at least, probably been the least well known. This has nothing to do with its nature, form or preservation, however, and more perhaps that it has, in a modern historical sense, no direct or obvious connection with named Iron Age royalty, real or imagined. The oppidum at Colchester, identified on Iron Age coin as Camulodunum, was claimed by British kings like Cunobelinos, whilst Silchester (Calleva) had Verica, St Albans (Verulamion) had Tasciovanos and Stanwick, Cartimandua. The unnamed Bagendon, when compared directly to Verulamion and Camulodunum, has undoubtedly fallen further into obscurity because of its failure to produce a well-documented sequence of wealthy Late Iron Age burials. This new work aims to change all that and place Bagendon where it belongs: at the centre of archaeological debate.
First recorded in the early eighteenth century, the earthen ramparts of Bagendon were scientifically examined by the pioneering archaeologist Elsie Clifford in 1954–6. The results of her work were published in considerable detail, and with commendable speed, in 1961 as Bagendon: A Belgic Oppidum, with a foreword by Mortimer Wheeler. In the years that followed, however, various reassessments of the original artefact assemblage, together with subsequent earthwork surveys by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, and limited ground investigation during phases of road development, raised worrying questions surrounding the established chronology, phasing and overall significance of the site.
Moore's new volume, written with a comprehensive array of specialist contributors, is a huge book in every sense of the word. Combining the results of a series of new excavations (2012–17), large-scale geophysical surveys (2008–16) and an analysis of previously unpublished work (1979–81), Moore has overseen something which marks a major advance in both our understanding of the Bagendon oppidum but also the nature of Iron Age settlement, trade and systems of power across southern Britain up to and beyond the Roman invasion.
Following an introduction to the site, placing it in context and summarising the earlier archaeological investigation, Part II opens with the details of an extensive programme of remote sensing. A total of 172 hectares have been examined, geophysical survey focusing on as much of the internal area as possible, together with a more limited examination of the periphery. The results, combined with LiDAR survey data, are presented together with detailed interpretative plots which suggest a very wide range of prehistoric, Roman and medieval activity. Intriguingly, internal divisions within the enclosure, trackways creating a potential grid-like arrangement together with a variety of pits and buildings including a number of roundhouses, appear akin to what has already been identified at the oppidum of Silchester.
The results of more detailed archaeological investigations conducted at Scrubditch and Cutham, two morphologically distinct antennae-like enclosure sites identified through geophysical survey, follow on in chapter 3. The dataset here is presented with a detailed set of aerial photographs, remote-sensing plots, plans, sections and full-colour excavation images. The Iron Age sites, which date to the third century b.c., each contained at least one roundhouse and associated pits, both apparently representing a regional variant of the more familiar Middle Iron Age banjo enclosures noted across central southern Britain. These may have had a role in the management and movement of livestock within the Cotswolds and between the Severn and Thames Valley. Together they flesh out the origins of the Bagendon oppidum, hinting at the wider range of complex settlement systems and seasonal agricultural meeting places that preceded it.
Recognising that the enclosures of Scrubditch and Cutham were abandoned at the point of significant landscape transformation, as the oppidum began to take shape, the publication then turns to an earlier phase of archaeological investigation, namely the work conducted in the valley bottom between 1979 and 1981 by Richard Reece and Stephen Trow. The results of this work, when combined with the more recent geophysical survey, fit seamlessly into the new research programme, the early excavations indicating a range of metallurgical activity, including iron smithing and smelting, bronze working and the minting of coins, with geophysics locating a variety of small enclosures and associated pits, industrial and settlement activity extending well beyond the excavated area. An examination of the pottery from the 1979–81 project further presents an opportunity to reanalyse the assemblage recorded by Clifford, suggesting that more extensive settlement began in the first two decades of the first century, developing significantly up to the a.d. 50s.
Chapter 5 concentrates on the third of the new sites to be examined directly as part of the project, at Black Grove in 2015. Here a small, early to mid-second century villa (or Romanised longhouse with pretensions), one of several stone structures overlooking Iron Age occupation in the valley below, was sample excavated. Although only a small area was investigated, the Black Grove building can be compared well with other archaeological discoveries in the area, such as ‘Ditches’ villa (published in 2008 by Stephen Trow, Simon James and Tom Moore), which suggest a cluster of early second-century villas developing out of, or directly over, an earlier phase of Iron Age settlement. The appearance of multiple Romanised locales suggests to Moore the presence of ‘families striving to villa-status after the conquest’ something which in turn implies ‘a more oligarchic or clan-like social structure, with multiple “elite” families located across the complex’.
Detailed specialist reports fill the middle section of the book, describing the ceramics, brooches, metalwork and metalworking debris, coins and coin moulds, glass, shale, building material, human remains and animal bone from each of the individual excavations in considerable detail and with useful summaries for the non-specialist reader. The final section of the book attempts to place Bagendon in context, looking first at its landscape setting, as determined through the geoarchaeological and land-snail evidence, viewshed analysis and additional geophysical surveys (at Hailey Wood Camp and Stratton Meadows), Moore himself rounding off the work with an examination of landscape change from the Early Iron Age to the mid-second century (‘Becoming the Dobunni?’) and a final overview of the oppidum in relation to the Late Iron Age/Early Roman transition in southern Britain (‘The Bagendon complex: a biography’).
A Biography of Power successfully presents a hugely significant sequence of settlement, outlining the continually evolving nature of cultural identity and elite power through the Iron Age and how, ultimately, the importance of this complex waned as nearby Roman Corinium grew. The fulsome nature of the geophysical surveys, combined with the detailed results of well-targeted excavations and comprehensive finds reporting, ensures that this volume is not only one of the more important research publications into that most critical of periods but one which, in time, will no doubt be one of the most influential.
