The Swale District An Archaeological Survey March 2000 Foreword by Professor Alan Everitt The Kent Archaeological Field School Director; Paul Wilkinson, PhD., MIFA., FRSA., MSIA. School Farm Oast, Graveney Road Faversham, Kent. ME13 8UP Tel: 01795 532548 or 07885 700 112. e-mail:
[email protected] www.kafs.co.uk Foreword England has no such dramatic Roman monuments as those to be seen in Mediterranean countries, or at towns like Arles and Orange in southern France. Striking remains can be found, as at Hadrian’s Wall in the north, or the walls of Richborough and Colchester in the south-east. Substantial stretches of the Roman road-network also survive to remind us of the massive impact of Imperial rule. But after the end of that period, Britannia took a rather different course from other parts of Europe, as Rosamand Faith has recently reminded us (Faith, 1997: 1), and the break with Roman tradition was more complete. The English climate, moreover, as we know to our cost today, is more destructive of ancient monuments than that of drier or sunnier countries. The walls of Colchester and Richborough have survived because they are built of indestructible flint. Such circumstances mean that the prehistoric past must be reconstructed from more fragmentary evidence. Often it can only be discovered through the kind of expert, systematic methods pioneered by Dr Paul Wilkinson and his team in the Swale District. Yet the sheer scale and variety of the evidence recorded in this report is astonishing: some 14,000 sherds of pottery alone, for example, and 231 fragments of painted wall-plaster at Deerton Street, still sufficiently vivid to give us some impression of the somewhat garish interior of a Roman villa.