Broad and Coarse: Modelling Demography, Subsistence and Transportation in Roman England

Abstract

The English Landscape and Identities project (EngLaId), which ran from 2011 to 2016 (ERC grant number 269797), was designed to take a long-term perspective on English archaeology from the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BCE) to the Domesday survey (1086 CE). It was a legacy data project that collated an immense number of records of English archaeology from a large number of different public and academic sources. Within this mountain of material, the Roman period (43 to 410/411 CE) stood out as being particularly fecund, accounting for 40% of the data (by record count) coming from only 15% of the total timespan of the project. This paper examines the ways in which the EngLaId project approached the modelling and analysis of its data for Roman England. We focus here on the three themes of demography, subsistence economy and transportation. Overall, EngLaId provides an interesting contrast to the possibilities and limitations of the other projects presented in this volume because of its large spatiotemporal scale and its (thus necessary) broad-brush approaches to data analysis and modelling. It is also this large spatiotemporal scale that helps situate the Roman period within a much longer span of history, making evident what was unique to this time period and what was constant across multiple periods.