Search results for ""Author Roger H. White""

Wroxeter: Ashes under Uricon offers a perspective on how people over time have viewed the abandoned Roman city of Wroxeter in Shropshire. It responds to three main artistic outputs relating to the site: poetry, images and texts. The poets include Wilfred Owen, A.E. Housman and Mary Webb. The writers cover a range of interests relating to the site but include Darwin, Dickens, Rosemary Sutcliff and John Buchan. The artists are perhaps less well-known but include watercolours by Thomas Girtin, archaeological reconstructions by Alan Sorrell and Amedée Forrestier, and paintings by Wroxeter’s own resident artist, Thomas Prytherch. Photographs are represented by the work of Francis Bedford and others more closely associated with aerial archaeology such as J.K. St Joseph and Arnold Baker. While the famous names have their value, The book also investigates what locals and visitors thought of the site over time – how they perceived it and have responded to it. It reflects in particular upon how the public and locals responded to the archaeological discoveries on the site and perceived the narratives that were created by the archaeologists working on it. It contends that archaeologists are just as much story-tellers as the writers, poets or artists, although their work is more filtered or controlled, and through these narratives, they inspire others. A further strand to the book is to explore the increasing focus over the past century on the democratisation of access to and understanding of the site, alongside increasing state intervention in its running. This too has had its impact on who visits and what is understood about the site. A short concluding section offers a vision of how the site might develop in the near-future, and how its cultural side might flourish once again.

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In the mid 1990s, the site of the Roman city of Viroconium Cornoviorum at Wroxeter, Shropshire, was subjected to one of the most intensive campaigns of geophysical survey ever carried out on a Roman town. The result was a complete plan of the city using magnetometry but also significant deployment of other technologies including resistance, GPR and more experimental technologies. Since that time, geophysical survey has continued intermittently, using the site as a geophysical laboratory. This volume reports on the archaeological interpretation of this work, marrying the extensive and nuanced geophysical data with a detailed analysis of the existing aerial photographic record created by Arnold Baker during the 1950s to 1980s. The resulting work is the first insula by insula description of all the visible buildings in the town, the first time that this has been attempted for a Romano-British town, and one of the few attempted anywhere in the Empire. The analysis has enabled a complete reinterpretation of the historical development of the town that links it to its surrounding hinterland and to wider concerns about Roman Urban development. The volume also contains detail of small-scale excavations that have been carried out since 1999 on the site, many in previously unexplored areas, and completes the publication of all outstanding archaeological work on the monument

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