29th May 2007, 10:45 PM
They're a small clan I know, but I was once told of a Roman fort up north that stood practically right next to a local settlement for a couple of generations and not a scrap of Roman tat was found in said Hibernian enclave. If true, it adds to the interesting question of whether the Scots were too canny/stubborn/unstratified/whatever to buy into the Pax Romana like us weak Sassanachs did (after the benefits had been carefully explained at the point of a pilum). Can anyone raise this out of the level of site-hut story with a decent reference or two?
I've never bought the 'it's too cold' interpretation, and I'm suspicious of macro-economic explanations based on the distance from Rome. Personally, I favour the idea that you'd need a particular kind of leadership structure that saw benefits for itself before the extant culture opened up to Romanisation, which perhaps the residents of north Scotland, north Germany etc. were lucky enough not to develop. I am only a disgruntled old semi-Marxist prehistorian though.
I've never bought the 'it's too cold' interpretation, and I'm suspicious of macro-economic explanations based on the distance from Rome. Personally, I favour the idea that you'd need a particular kind of leadership structure that saw benefits for itself before the extant culture opened up to Romanisation, which perhaps the residents of north Scotland, north Germany etc. were lucky enough not to develop. I am only a disgruntled old semi-Marxist prehistorian though.
