Search results for ""author peter davenport""

For almost three hundred years, excavations have been carried out in Roman Bath. At first these were rare and sporadic and archaeological finds were made by chance. Even fewer were reported. But from the 1860s, deliberate investigations were made and increasingly professional methods employed. The Roman Baths were laid open to view, but little was published. From the 1950s, interest accelerated, professionals and amateurs collaborated, and there was never a decade in which some new discovery was not made. The first popular but authoritative presentation of this work was made in 1971 and updated several times. However, from the 1990s to the present there has been some sort of archaeological investigation almost every year. This has thrown much new and unexpected light on the town of Aquae Sulis and its citizens. In this book, Peter Davenport, having been involved in most of the archaeological work in Bath since 1980, attempts to tell the story of Roman Bath: the latest interim report on the ‘Three Hundred Year Dig’.

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Prior to the building of the new Bath Spa, in the centre of the World Heritage City of Bath, excavations were carried out to record the archaeological remains threatened by its construction. Evidence was recovered of the presence and perhaps the rituals of mesolithic hunter-gatherers, hitherto unknown official Roman buildings of the first and second centuries and some indication of activity in the late Saxon and medieval periods. An important part of the dig was a programme of geoarchaeological research to study the microstructure of the soils excavated with a view to understanding the activities that led to their formation.

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