Fly Tipping by the Romans

Shock, Horror. For all of their organisational skills and attention to detail, as required to create a large and functioning Empire on 3 across vast swaths of 3 continents, the Romans were actually rather guilty of leaving behind quite a lot of trash. 

That is quite understandable after, in England, nearly 400 years of occupation, suppression and settlement. 

The presence of rubbish dumps and waste deposits has given a detailed and unique insight into the more mundane activities and practices of the Romans and no more so than excavated from the field site of a major regional military camp at Brough in East Yorkshire. 

Under its period name of Petuaria the four and a half acre site was one of the few in England to have been in use for the whole duration of the Roman Occupation of the country. 

Merchant and military shipping unloaded and disembarked after making their way up the Humber Estuary from other parts of the Empire and struck out for York and beyond. 

At that time it was possible to ford the river easily at low tide and so there was a continuation of the Ermine Street corridor from the Southern parts of Britain. 

Petuaria was therefore a busy staging post. Even before the arrival of the invaders the area was part of the territory of the Parisi Tribe. 

Modern era excavations found a large camp with ditches on three sides and later walls and fortifications in local limestone. These included projecting Bastions which were projections to conduct a side-on defence against attackers. This indicated the planned process of developing the site across a number of epochs of occupation. In one archaelogical dig a stone with an inscription referred to a Theatre.

There were traces of conflict and the site will have been pillaged quite frequently. 

Found in the discarded rubbish were coins from the reign of, in no particular order, Marcus Aurelius, Constantious, Licinius and the Usurper Emperor Alectus. 

Domestic tools and objects included Samian Earthenware with some items bearing the name of its makers, amongst them Divicators and Paullus. 

One notable find although incomplete was a handle for a wine jar of a type three feet high. Cooking vessels and weaving frames will have been in daily use and readily discarded after use or if damaged. More fancy items illustrated that there was some wealth around. 

Jewellery finds included a brooch depicting a wild boar, the animal being held in some reverence in particular by the Parisi. 

More morbid discoveries were of the skeletons of babies although live sacrifices were known to take place as part of a ritual blessing of buildings and this could have been the case at Petuaria. 

This area around what is the now large commuter area of Brough continues to throw up relics of the Roman Occupation under the farmers plough or where new housing estate residents happen to disturb the ground in their gardens.