Blog Post #63: Graduate Student Feature with Neal Payne

One of Peopling the Past’s goals is to amplify the work of young and/or under-represented scholars and the amazing research that they are doing to add new perspectives to the fields of ancient history and archaeology (broadly construed). We will thus feature several blog posts throughout the year interviewing graduate students on their research topics, focusing on how they shed light on real people in the past.

What topic do you study? 

I am a third year PhD student in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, Darwin College. I am a Roman archaeologist with a focus in Roman Britain and archaeobotany.  

My thesis research focuses on long-term agricultural change spanning a millennium between 800 BCE and 800 CE in Yorkshire (Fig. 1), with a particular emphasis on the Roman conquest of the region. My study area correlates roughly with the modern English counties of East, North, South, and West Yorkshire, though extends northward across the Tees Valley into southern Durham and south across the Humber into North Lincolnshire. This geographic region lies between the militarised northern frontier and the more prolonged Pre-Flavian Roman occupation to the south.  

What sources or data do you use?

My PhD research draws together the vast wealth of previously produced archaeobotanical research from Yorkshire. This includes reports produced by both research excavations such as the one I have been involved with at Aldborough (Fig. 2), and archaeobotanical specialist reports produced as part of developer funded commercial archaeological excavations. My project has collated and standardized the archaeobotanical reports from over 500 archaeological sites, and over 2500 unique archaeological contexts.

How does your research shed light on real people in the past? 

People, plants, and their landscape are fundamentally entangled. As such, my project uses changes in plant remains as a proxy for the changes occurring in people’s everyday lives.

Traditionally, the Roman conquest of Britain has been viewed as either the imposition of Roman material culture, and more problematically civilization, on to the local population by either the Romans or local elites; or more recently, through a narrative of local resistance to these external forces. Both approaches structure a firm dichotomy between the Romans and the Iron Age peoples of Britain. This binary conceals the diverse responses to the region’s annexation evident in the archaeological record, while also problematically framing the Romans as a single monolithic entity.

The botanical dimension of the Roman conquest of Britain has likewise been rooted in this binary, with specific plants coming to be seen as indicators of Roman cultural practices and progress. This framing reductively homogenizes the impact Roman conquest had for different people across the annexed territory. By disengaging from these predefined narratives of polarizing adoption or resistance, my thesis research is working towards exploring the diversity with which people engaged with the plants and their shared landscape across this transformative period, foregrounding the non-fixed nature of this process – its spatial and temporal variation.