Partridge Clive. Skeleton Green: A Late Iron Age and Romano-British Site Skeleton Green: A Late Iron Age and Romano-British Site

Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1981. — 378 p. — (Britannia Monograph Series 2).The great importance of the late Iron Age settlement at Puckeridge and Braughing has only recently become clear, although the existence of a small Romano-British town at Braughing itself had long been known. Discoveries during the last 10 years of preRoman British coins in the area in unusual quantities and unexpected variety gave the first clue, which was greatly reinforced when the large Henderson collection of archaeological finds from the defended site at Gates bury, formed by a local landowner in the 1930s, was acquired by the Hertford Museum and became available for study. It proved to contain important quantities of debris from a pre-Roman mint as well as a surprising amount of Italian Arretine together with Gallo-Belgic pottery - evidence for significant trade with the continent in the reign of Augustus. All these finds were placed in context by the excavations described in this monograph. These examined four stratified phases of pre-Roman occupation covering the period c. 5 B.C. - A.D.43 which were found to underlie early Romano-British occupation and a second-century cemetery (which contained an interesting group of burials with decorated wooden caskets). In the pre-Roman phase a series of buildings was discovered which forms one of the best sequences of such structures yet found in Britain, while the study of the large collection of imported pottery associated with them breaks new ground in our knowledge of these wares and of their chronology in the closing decades of British independence. Because of its association with this welldated material the local pottery in use in the settlement also provides an important study. Thus this monograph offers new perspectives, both of the archaeology of southeast Britain in the period of the late Belgic kingdoms and of the categories of imported wares first studied in the pre-war excavations at Camulodunum.