Discovering ritual landscapes in southern rural Roman Britain, with particular reference to Kent

In rural Roman southern Britain, a great many masonry-built structures have been identified and often excavated to varying degrees of competence and completeness. Invariably the majority of these sites have been labelled as ‘villas’. They have traditionally been understood to be grand houses in the ‘Roman’ style at the heart of a farming estate. But what if that narrative is not quite right? This thesis examines 10 such examples and asks whether we have fully appreciated the important role that religious beliefs and practises played in everyday life. Pre-Roman Britain was a tribal society composed of many small clan groups rooted in an ancestral landscape that relied upon the agricultural produce of the land. Once southern Britain became part of a Roman province those factors still remained embedded within a hybrid culture that was driven by local superstitions and sacred rituals. Many of those ‘villas’ can be interpreted as part of the pagus infrastructure which revolved around the grain cycle within fertile river valleys where the river deity was venerated as the bringer of life and fecundity. This reappraisal potentially has far reaching consequences for our understanding of the way that rural life was lived in the south of Roman Britain and provides a more convincing narrative for many of those stone structures in the landscape that we call ‘villas’.