Great round-up. Amazing how much you were able to achieve in just three and a bit days. And you managed to do the whole thing without mentioning....ALL....THAT....RAIN!
We may be in a field, but we're also in a trench, working alongside eachother for 8 hours a day. We can add subtitles, but we can't compromise on safety. Hope you understand!
It's very irritating that you talk about the Romans and you talk about "others" who "predated" their occupation. Well, "The Others" are us, who have been here all along. This happens with Anglo-Saxon and Norman discussions as well. Never forget that, for all their organizational achievements, Romans, Anglo Saxons and Normans were the invading oppressors, and while their positive legacies are large, their negative legacies are still with us too. Good to see the progress at Elmswell after last year's test trenches. I'd be interested to see a Plan of the new trench in relation to the prior ones.
That's a very fair point. However, I suppose the difficulty that comes in is that we're not just talking about the people who were occupying the area immediately before the Romans came in. We know that the Parisi were in the region, but some of the finds we've made far predate that, and until we get them analysed in the lab, we don't know exactly how old they are or who they represent (some of the finds we're talking about may go all the way back to the Bronze Age or even palaeolithic).We certainly don't mean 'others' in the sense of them being outsiders, peripheral, or less significant people, but 'others' in the sense of people from a whole range of different times and cultures who we'll only be able to be more specific about once we've got more conclusive interpretations from our experts. Hope that makes sense? You can see more info from the dig, including an overlay of this year's trench location over the one from 2018 here: digventures.com/2020/08/returning-to-the-early-romans-of-east-yorkshire/
Personally, I don't like to think of people so far distant as "us". The Mesolithic hunter-gathers in what is now Britain were replaced after about 6000 years by the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family approx 4000 BCE. Were successive Beaker People, Bronze Age archers, or Iron Age warriors "us"? Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, various Scandinavians, Normans etc arguably pushed indigenous people aside but possibly only in a political sense - the people remained and adopted the ways of incomers, rather than moving Westward or disappearing. Plus, the concept of nationality didn't exist before 1200 - 1250, at least; long after the Romans, Vikings, Normans etc invaded
