Life and Death in Roman Carlisle

Life and Death in Roman Carlisle makes an important contribution to the study of burials and identity in the region of Hadrian’s Wall. The book presents the results of excavations beneath Cumbria House, a new municipal building on Botchergate in the city centre. In Roman times this was the location of part of a roadside cremation cemetery associated with a fort established by the Roman army in AD 73. Those buried in this part of the cemetery died in the years just prior to and during the building of Hadrian’s Wall, when Luguvalium was emerging as the most important Roman military base and largest urban centre in northwest Britain. As a result of this swift rise in profile, the early settlement-edge funerary enclosures quickly went out of use, being swallowed up and overbuilt by the expanding extramural settlement.

Early Roman Carlisle would have boasted a vibrant multicultural population, and this is reflected in its burial evidence. Among the remains of some twenty cremation burials excavated at Cumbria House are the two most richly furnished examples from northern Britain. While the large assemblages of ceramic grave goods are unlike those of any other burials in the military north, close parallels are known from the France/Belgium border, in the former territory of the Nervii. The Nervians were described by Julius Caesar as having the fiercest fighters of all the Gallic tribes and this area was a major source of recruitment for the Roman army. Most of the pottery vessels placed in the graves were produced locally, probably at kilns within Roman Carlisle, and thus must have been made to order by those familiar with both the burial rites and the ceramic repertoire of the Nervian region.

The presence of a community of Nervians living in Luguvalium in the early second century is a new discovery but fits well with previous arguments made about the possible replacement of the Ala Gallorum Sebosiana with another unit from Gallia Belgica when the fort at Luguvalium was completely rebuilt around AD 105.  Meticulously referencing the relevant literature from Roman Britain and the Continent, the authors explore the significance of the new data for our understanding of the make-up of Roman Carlisle’s population and the identity of its various garrisons.