07-15-2011, 01:51 PM
Quote:I was reading a"The Roman Empire" by Colin Wells. In particular I was reading about Septimius Severus' marching camps in southern Scotland. He says that through aerial photography, camps have been identified up the east coast of Scotland almost to the Moray Firth. Now I know that camps are visible from the air, but is there really a way to identify from what time period they come from? Can you tell from the air that a camp is Severus' Campaign and not, say, Agricola's? I'm not trying to be funny, I'm just curious if there are any tell-tale signs.
Thanks!!
No-one has picked this up so I'll give you a quick reply. There are two strands to this. One is that major camps in Scotland tend to fall into various size series, some of which are suggested as Flavian, others as Severan/Caracallan. So there are a 25ha, 48ha, and 66ha series that are thought to be Severan, with a kick-off point of 66ha at Newstead in the Scottish Borders. The second is that dating evidence tends to be sparse to rare from such sites, so what little there is has to be cross-correlated between sites and camp series. A coin here, sherd of pottery there, all go to support the theories as to which camps are Flavian and which Severan.
There are also things peculiar to camp design, such as clavicula gateways, which are generally thought to be Flavian, so camp series featuring these don't belong to the Severan campaigns.
So, yes, you can identify camps from the air where you can see a large proportion of any individual site (and that doesn't always happen; you might just see a corner), and work out the area, or where you can distinguish a characteristic feature.
Mike Bishop
