In This Section:

7.10.1 Research Questions

Overarching

  • What was the chronology of the wide range of campaign (marching) camps in south east Scotland?

Settlement

  • What and where were the activity areas of sites – such as the locations of stabling, refuse disposal and metalworking areas?
    • Soil geochemistry has the potential to determine activity areas within sites, including the potential to identify stabling, refuse disposal and metal working areas.
  • What was the technology used for the different buildings and where was the source of building materials?
    • There is a need to systematically explore the use of building materials for past and future investigations, including by geology (for stone) and micromorphology (for turf; Romankiewicz et al. 2020, 2022, with the potential for the study of wood from waterlogged deposits at some sites. The consideration of the whole suite of building materials, including ceramic building materials, lead, stone and wood will give a richer understanding of resource acquisition, building technologies and the infrastructure required to support them. Experimental reconstruction may provide important insights into construction methods.
  • What is the density of settlement in the lowland areas between hillforts around the Tweed Valley and the lowlands adjacent to the Cheviot line during the period of Roman presence?
    • Survey and excavation of Iron Age sites contemporary with the Roman presence in south east Scotland and NE England is critical to understand the interface with local populations.
  • Can further Borders broch sites be identified and who are their occupants?
  • What is the relationship of Traprain to Inveresk Roman fort?
  • What impact did interactions with the Romans have on the indigenous population and what were their reactions to it?
    • This needs to be understood as one or several processes rather an event which acknowledges the context in which interaction took place, how that varied through time and the complexity of the local response.
  • Where is the evidence for Roman interaction in East Lothian?  Was there a pax Romana?
    • There is a particular argument for targeted survey for evidence of Roman activity in East Lothian to focus on the area to the east of Inveresk, which may have been more amenable towards Roman activity; archaeological evidence may be less visible in the landscape as there was less need for fortifications to be constructed.
  • What were the logistics of supplying and maintaining an army, both when settled in occupation and when engaged in conquest?
    • The position of sites within the landscape, as well as transport links over land and water can contribute to understanding that sustainability, and potential vulnerability (Tibbs 2022). Survey of the camps along the Leader Water, Upper Tweed and Teviot valleys would help to gain a finer-tuned understanding of Roman activities beyond the better understood long-term forts. Studies of both forts and campaign camps will help understand their role in domination of the landscape as well. Approaches taken to study a mix of permanent and temporary camps in other parts of the Roman Empire in Europe provide a valuable example of what can be achieved and indicate research methodologies that should be followed (summarised in Hüssen et al. 2020)
  • What were the tactics and strategies of Roman occupation forces.
    • As well as a focus on the history of Roman occupation itself, the process of campaigning needs to form a research area, having been marginalised in recent decades. Exemplars of the tactics of Roman occupation forces elsewhere in the Empire (provided by Josephus, Dio etc as well as by recent work in Northumberland by Hodgson et al.) should be considered when developing a future framework to investigate the effects of Roman aggression and occupation with respect to south east Scotland. Investigating sites using non-invasive techniques such as metal detecting along with GPS recording may detect patterns or location of fighting or siege activity e.g. to locate lead sling bullets.
  • What was the Roman impact on the culture within Iron Age settlements?
  • What was the context, nature and chronology of the Roman withdrawal(s)? 
    • This remains poorly understood and close attention to destruction deposits in past and future fieldwork remains an area of priority. The reasons for it and the chronology of it are also a priority. The confirmation/refutation of reported evidence (Frere 1987) of widespread and, therefore possibly conflict-related, burning at Roman installations including Corbridge, High Rochester, Cappuck, Oakwood and Newstead would be significant. Further assessment of the coin evidence from Newstead may shed light on the possible desertion dates of that fort. The desertion deposits from Newstead, and particularly the evidence of the wells, may shed further light on the ritual/conflict debate.
  • How were both objects and ideas circulated between the Roman and non-Roman worlds.
    • Specialist regional studies are needed on categories of material culture including a comprehensive consideration of Roman finds from non-Roman sites and vice versa, detailed study of specific artefact classes and technology, analysis of coin finds and the study of hybrid forms of material culture.
  • What was the pattern of later use and reuse of Roman sites in south east Scotland? 

Religion

  • Where are religious monuments and possible temple sites located? Can a systematic survey outside of forts help locate more?
    • Additional finds of sculpture or altars may provide key information, although discovery may be opportunistic. Geophysics survey of the environs of Roman forts will be helpful, and the recent indications of a probable temple outside the fort at Birrens are an indication of the potential. Although destroyed, Easter Langlee merits further analysis, including its possible relationship to any other monuments on the north side of the Tweed.
  • Are there examples of deliberate religious deposition?
    • Potential acts of structured deposition are ripe for re-examination. An integrated study of the material from the Newstead pits, with a detailed consideration of the selection and condition of the objects, should form part of this. Finds of objects outside forts should also be considered as potential acts of deliberate deposition, although they may have diverse interpretations.
  • Where were the cemeteries located?
    • Geophysics outside the boundaries of forts, particularly along likely routeways, have the potential to locate cemeteries.

Routeways

  • Where were the cross-country routes?
    • Topographic information from LiDAR using the national data set or photogrammetric survey by drones has considerable potential for significant discoveries. There are parallels elsewhere in the UK which should be augmented by a rigorous review of past work and targeted additional fieldwork. Specific attention should be paid to the E–W routes especially those extending from Carham to Newstead, thence to Lyne in the Upper Tweed valley and onward to the River North Esk valley, skirting the eastern side of the Pentland hills and also W–E from Inveresk in the direction of Traprain Law.
  • What were the routes and potential crossing points of rivers during the Roman period?
    • River channel change should be much better understood. Considerations of Roman engineering projects (roads, bridges) too often assume that rivers in the Roman Iron Age were much as they are today: they may not have been. Riverine transport of men and materials was also affected by the shape, discharge, sedimentary structures and sediment loads of channels. Almost nothing of these is known for any river in the region, even one as important as the River Tweed (Passmore and Waddington 2009). Geophysical prospecting techniques might usefully be applied to defining where river crossings were, given the rich rewards that study of the crossing of the River Tees at Piercebridge has yielded (Eckhardt and Walton 2021). 
  • How navigable were the rivers?
  • Where were the harbours and ports used by the Roman Army?
    • Whilst structural evidence of Roman waterfront structures in Scotland is non-existent, reconstruction of the palaeoenvironmental prerequisites for potential port, harbour and beaching sites and the necessary access to the open sea might assist in the recognition of possible areas for investigative fieldwork. Any opportunities that arise to investigate port sites or maritime facilities should be taken.
  • What was the importance of Tweedmouth/Berwick upon Tweed for control and supply of the south-east of Scotland?
    • Further up the river Tweed is the important site of Trimontium. Cross-partnership opportunities should be taken to explore likely and possible Roman sites and camps either side of the current political boundary.

Subsistence and Farming

  • What were the different types of arable economy in the region? Can Van der Veen’s (1992) criteria be applied to the region?
  • Did the native rural economy expand or intensify to service Roman occupation?
  • Can isotope analyses of animal bones shed more light on mobility and land management?

Material Culture

  • Which local raw material sources (stone, metal ores etc.) were exploited?  Where were the possible quarry sites?
    • Survey of potential quarry sites, along with geochemical analysis of raw material and finished artefacts would be useful. Siller Holes should be further explored as a possible lead and silver source. Soil contamination and analysis of slags on sites may help. Analysis of isotopes may also help identify sources further afield, most notably for lead.
  • Where were different ceramics manufactured?
    • Work to look at ceramic manufacture could include, geophysical surveying for kiln locations and geochemical analysis of artefacts, which would include bricks and tiles as well as pottery.
  • How were glass items produced and disctributed?
    • Detailed examination of glass production, particularly of beads and bangles, where local production is needed. The distribution of portable glass items across Roman and Iron Age contexts frames a series of questions around interaction and meaning (Ingemark 2014).
  • What were the supply patterns of material imported over longer distances? How did these patterns change with chronology and geography?
    • For example, does material acquired along waterways differ from material acquired by road? A research project systematically comparing patterns of imports between the two walls would be valuable in revealing similarities and differences.

Environment

  • What were and who were making decisions in the management of the rural economy at the farm scale in the region? How, why and when did land use change?
  • Are any local landnam events (where woodland was cleared and cultivated) dated after AD80 (using Bayesian approaches)
    • Without this we cannot understand Roman-native interaction or whether and how the native rural economy responded to a new Roman ‘market’.
  • Can annually resolved analyses define the apparent rapidity of local landnam events, (where woodland was cleared and cultivated) which with quantification of landscape openness can reveal how woodland was cleared. 
  • What was the extent of deforestation where woodland was cleared?
  • How was native settlement disrupted within the Roman Iron Age and can this be seen in the pollen data?
    • Settlement abandonment from archaeological evidence is, by its nature, difficult to establish because it is an absence of evidence for settlement continuity (Close-Brooks 1987; Harding 2004, 203). Pollen data are different because they record, for instance, the abandonment of land, but critically, also what came after, such as woodland regeneration; the absence of evidence can be explained. Only with temporal precision can we relate our findings to other proxy data on population change and environmental stresses, which are increasingly resolvable at annual timescales (for example, McConnell et al. 2018).
  • How was the woodland managed?
    • Linking pollen records to the detailed analysis of wood charcoal and waterlogged wood from excavations may give specific insights into woodland management.
  • How did the palaeogeography of the Forth estuary change over the Roman Iron age?
    • Marine penetration of the Forth estuary deserves further scientific work from  detailed diatom analyses targeted at key localities (for example, at Carriden) with the kind of careful dating framework produced by Barlow et al.(2014). This provides the bulk of materials in developing the maze of mudflats and salt marsh that would develop in the absence of dredging. More dating controls on late Holocene estuarine sediment fills in the estuary are needed; there are very few (Smith et al. 2010). The aim should be to and, beyond the SESARF framework, this would help define its relation to the Antonine Wall.

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