CLAUDIAN CONQUEST, COLONIES, AND CITYSCAPES

By the early first century AD, objectscapes across northwest Europe had been revolutionised by the spread of dramatically new standardised things. The proliferation of these new objects was a consequence of surges in inter-regional connectivity linked to multiple phenomena: Roman conquest, military presence, the development of provincial infrastructure, and the expansion of clientship and kinship networks that connected the late Iron Age societies of northern Gaul and beyond. One expected effect of such increases in connectivity might be to see new standardised objects such as amphorae and Italian-style terra sigillata achieve wide circulation in northwest Europe. But this is not what happened – at least not straight away. The first standardised pottery vessels to achieve deep social penetration in the Augustan-Tiberian period were in fact regionally-produced Gallo-Belgic wares, whereas terra sigillata did not attain equivalent levels of circulation beyond military and urban spheres until the late first century AD. Instead, arguably the most important impact of increased connectivity in the Augustan-Tiberian period was the geographical and stylistic extension of a single inter-artefactual domain across a large part of northwest Europe. It was this development that informed the innovative Gallo-Belgic ware repertoire (for example), which drew influence in equal measure from Roman military objectscapes and those connected to the late Iron Age societies of the region. Indeed, the combination of increased connectivity and a single extended inter-artefactual domain helps to explain why Augustan-Tiberian objectscapes from southern Britain closely resemble those across the Channel, even though Britain was not formally part of the Roman empire at the time.

Against the backdrop of a fundamentally new inter-regional system of human and object relations that emerged at the start of the first century AD, this chapter considers how the situation developed into the Claudio-Neronian era (archaeologically, c. AD 40-70). The Claudian period brought sweeping changes to northwest Europe, including the conquest and annexation of southeast Britain by four legions from AD 43, the resulting reorganisation of Roman military forces in the Rhineland, and fresh impetus to the development of monumentalised cityscapes in Gallia Belgica.