14 



THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 



frustrated by a shortage of archaeological material 

 (Frere 1967, 274; Burnham andWacher 1990). The 

 1983 review (Borthwick and Chandler 1984) 

 concluded that any one of the three sites currently 

 under examination - Old Sarum, Bishopdown, and 

 Stratford-sub-Castle - could have been Roman 

 Sorviodunum, while more recently Stratford-sub- 

 Castle has been considered the likely focus of the 

 settlement (Corney 2001). Careful examination of 

 all the evidence presented in the previous section 

 enables a clearer picture to emerge. 



In Table 2 a number of key archaeological 

 indicators for the three sites are compared. From it 

 the following points can be made: 



1 . Settlement appears to have occurred 

 throughout the Roman period at Old Sarum and 

 Stratford-sub-Castle and there is some evidence to 

 suggest that Old Sarum may have been occupied 

 at the time of the Conquest but possibly not so 

 intensely in the later Roman period. 



2. Finds of construction materials and 

 structures of some consequence indicate there was 

 a substantial settlement at Stratford-sub-Castle and 

 the likelihood of a similar one at Old Sarum. 



3. The evidence from artifacts, and building 

 debris, together with elements of a street grid shown 

 on aerial photographs of Stratford-sub-Castle 

 suggests a degree of planning and the presence of 

 an urban or 'town' settlement. 1 " 1 



4. Although only a small amount of early 

 occupation material has been found on 

 Bishopdown, in the later Roman period settlement 

 appears to have been flourishing and was probably 

 a suburb or extra-mural part of the 'town'. It was 

 possibly focussed alongside a road/trackway leading 

 south-east towards the New Forest (Stone and 

 Algar 1955, Corney 2001). 



5. The area covered by the three sites discovered 

 so far is considerable, between 36 and 45ha. 



The conclusions reached above are necessarily 

 tentative. However, analytical techniques and 

 research studies can assist in clarifying the picture 

 further. Perhaps one of the most useful ones is the 

 relatively recent development of a more 

 sophisticated method of analysing coin losses at 

 individual sites compared with the mean over the 

 whole of the country (Reece 1991, 1993, 1995). 

 Analysis by Reece of the coin loss at 140 sites in 

 Britain has shown that particular types of sites 

 exhibit similar cumulative frequency loss profiles. 

 He found that towns had a different loss pattern 

 from other more rural settlements while those in 

 eastern Britain were in turn different from the ones 



Table 3: Numbers of coins identified by period (Reece 1991) 



Period 



Date 



Old 



Bishop- 



Stratford 



Total 



No. 





Sarum 



down 



sub Castle 





1 



to 4 IAD 



_ 



_ 



2 





2 



2 



41-54 



- 



- 



1 





1 



3 



54-68 



- 



- 



1 





1 



4 



69-96 



- 



- 



4 





4 



5 



96-117 



2 



- 



1 





3 



6 



117-138 



1 



- 



- 





1 



7 



138-161 



1 



- 



2 





3 



8 



161-180 



- 



- 



- 





- 



9 



180-192 



- 



- 



1 





1 



10 



193-222 



2 



- 



1 





3 



11 



222-238 



1 



- 



- 





1 



12 



238-260 



- 



- 



2 





2 



13 



260-275 



3 



1 



11 





15 



14 



275-296 



3 



1 



2 





6 



15 



296-317 



1 



- 



- 





1 



16 



317-330 



2 



3 



4 





9 



17 



330-348 



3 



2 



3 





8 



18 



348-364 



2 



2 



1 





5 



19 



364-378 



- 



2 



2 





4 



20 



378-388 



1 



1 



- 





2 



21 



388-402 



2 



3 



- 





5 



Totals 





24 



15 



38 





77 



in the 



west of the 



country. 



In addition forts : 



temples 



and villas each had their own distinctive individual 

 profiles. A final group, called 'bad' towns, showed 

 maximum coin loss in the later 4th century as 

 opposed to the almost equal coin loss in the 3rd 

 and 4th century exhibited by the 'good' towns. 



The total recorded number of coins found at the 

 three sites under examination in the present study is 

 93. Of these 16 could not be positively dated. 

 Although the remaining 77 coins is a relatively 

 modest figure (Table 3) it compares quite favourably 

 with the small numbers found at eight of the 140 

 sites examined by Reece (1991). A cumulative 

 frequency analysis was carried out on the data and 

 the result is presented in Figure 5. This shows clearly 

 that the coin loss profile for the three sites taken 

 together is broadly in agreement with the average 

 for a 'good' Western town but not with that for a 

 Western settlement or a 'bad' town. Examination of 

 Table 3 shows that the coin losses in the 3rd and 4th 

 centuries AD are broadly comparable. 



Sorviodunum 

 ■ "Bad" Towns 



Coin Period 



- Western Towns -©- Western Settlements 



Fig. 5. Com loss profiles 



