GROUP IDENTITIES IN LONDON

It has long been recognised that Londinium had spatial differentiation of urban character and social groups, with division by watercourses particularly notable. Researchers are using such topographic variation to structure interpretationsFootnote ² and these volumes add significant detail to our knowledge of this diversity.

On the Southwark mainland, the Tabard Square excavations demonstrate that the divergence in alignments from the main road extended across the northern mainland, c. a.d. 50–160 (also present at 223–237 Borough High Street (223BHS81), Silvester Buildings (SB76) and Arcadia Buildings (AB78)), although this is mentioned only in passing in Temples and Suburbs (e.g. 248, 259). While Killock argues for the agency of a centralised authority and the military throughout the interpretation of developments at Tabard Square, it is as likely that when people chose to construct buildings, drainage and boundaries to align to anything but a nearby major road, they expressed a different relationship to urban infrastructure, less connection to planning and central authority, and were, perhaps, working together as a group to replicate and expand this divergence.Footnote ³ The discovery of a previously unknown road (Temples and Suburbs, 20–1) on the same alignment leading towards the waterfront provides an explanation: these people were likely economically and socially orientated towards the river.Footnote ⁴ Some of them may have been indigenous metal-workersFootnote ⁵ in the first century and sea-faring traders from Gaul in the Antonine period (Tomlin in Temples and Suburbs, 193). Unlike at the other sites, at Tabard Square this alignment continued into the end of the Roman period and this critical moment — when, elsewhere, people were choosing to orientate themselves towards the main road — is marked by a significant ‘votive’ or ‘special’ deposit within a major boundary ditch at Tabard Square that reinforces the significance of this alignment (Temples and Suburbs, 30–2, 243–7). That the religious precinct and later Romano-Celtic temples, built after the road was destroyed, retained the older alignment suggests the significance of maintaining continuity common to cult sites across the Empire. From the Tabard Square inscription (Tomlin in Temples and Suburbs, 192–3), it may be possible to identify this group as a guild of Gallic traders.Footnote ⁶ This inscription is given remarkably little attention in Temples and Suburbs, considering the research it has generated since its original publication,Footnote ⁷ but the implications of possible dependency and co-operation between Britons and Gauls, or between people bound by belief and settlement area, acting in opposition to the settlement structure are intriguing.

At the opposite end of the settlement (The Upper Walbrook Valley Cemetery), c. 150 burials have been excavated in a separate group from the northern cemetery, to the east, and reached by a minor road. The social group who chose this cemetery were likely connected by belief, rather than occupation area. This group chose a special environment for the interment of their dead — one criss-crossed by the tributaries of the stream and prone to fluvial erosion leading to disarticulation of human remains. While the authors suggest the explanation of a possible paupers' plot (134), undesirable but affordable, the osteological analysis and burial goods were not significantly divergent from Londinium’s other cemeteries (apart from a higher proportion of males), where, in any case, there are no groups of particularly high-status burials located in more desirable locations. This cemetery provides an excellent case study in non-normative burial rites, including exposure, disarticulation and deliberate burial in a location known to flood and result in the transportation of human remains downstream. Belief related to the significance of water is known across the Iron Age and Roman periods in north-west Europe and the Walbrook in particular became a focus of religious and cult activity.Footnote ⁸ The authors’ caution on this point is certainly valid, but in the context of other forms of deviant burial,Footnote ⁹ this cemetery provides further evidence for the possibility that certain social groups shared non-normative burial practices and made deliberately different choices in their treatment of the dead.

From the Bloomberg tablets and the Tabard Square inscription, we now have epigraphic evidence to support Tacitus’ assertion (Annals 14.33) and to demonstrate that early Londinium was dominated by merchants and traders, including citizens, non-citizens, slaves and freedmen. Only nine military figures are named on the tablets, in contrast to c. 80 other men (including a man who traded with merchants in Verulamium, a beer-seller, a barrel-maker, a brewer, and a possible poultry-keeper-cum-financier), 20 of whom were non-Romans or had names of Celtic origin. The tablets provide evidence to contradict those who imagine an early military presence in London, such as Killock's interpretation of official planning and military labour in the drainage and land-reclamation activities c. a.d. 43–80 (Temples and Suburbs, 238). The all-too-brief interpretative essay (51–8) offered in Roman London's First Voices indicates what lines of inquiry we can hope to see in future investigations into the nature of Londinium’s social groups.

THE POSSIBILITIES OF SYNTHESIS

Understanding the results of the nine excavations represented by these volumes in the context of the 1,600+ excavations from the City and Southwark is largely impossible without a great deal of work. Phased synthesis of London is absent north of the Thames after c. a.d. 60/61,Footnote ¹⁰ which presents a great difficulty for anyone interested in the city as a whole. Researchers must visit the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) for actual data, but contextual and spatial information to demonstrate how the deposits relate to the wider settlement has not been compiled.

As regards these volumes, the late Roman waterfront and third-century riverside wall presented in Roman and Medieval Revetments on the Thames Waterfront are all but meaningless without at least five other publications to handFootnote ¹¹ and a visit to the archive to see the finds registers. For example, the decision to include in the appendices only the illustrated examples is disappointing, especially when statements such as ‘An interesting assemblage of Roman leather was recovered … Shoe assemblages of this date are comparatively rare in London and elsewhere in Britain’ (11) lead the reader to look to the specialist appendix with excitement, only to be disappointed by the one shoe illustrated and catalogued (127). Similarly, in Southwark, Killock has not included the topographic detail of Cowan et al. Reference Cowan, Seeley, Wardle, Westman and Wheeler2009, making understanding the surrounding context of the site quite difficult. Happily, incorporating the Tabard Square data into future synthesis of Southwark should not be difficult, given that Killock has used a similar phasing structure.

The LAARC is an archive of international significance, but lack of support for this resource puts future research on London at a disadvantage. Although it would be a significant undertaking, with proper funding it would be possible to create, digitise and make publicly available phased maps of every excavation from London along with relational databases of contextual data and artefacts.