INTRODUCTION

Up to now we have been exploring the different foods and drinks one by one. The next four chapters examine patterns of eating and drinking chronologically. They look at what particular communities' preferences were, and how these change with both time and place.

We start with the late Iron Age. It is not possible to draw a boundary between prehistoric and Roman Britain at a particular date. In the south-east of England some communities were adopting what looks like a ‘Romanised’ lifestyle a century or more preceding the formal invasion. So much so that it has been argued that the south-east could be regarded as occupied by a series of client kingdoms between Caesar's raids and the Claudian invasion. Elsewhere much of the population carried on their lives after AD 43 happily oblivious to the fact that they were now part of the Roman empire. In many sites in Gloucestershire, for example, noticeable changes in the way people dressed and the things they used are not detectable until the second century.

This chapter explores some of the variety in eating practice that can be detected in the century or so prior to the conventional date of the conquest. As a convenient shorthand, areas will be referred to by the civitas names they were to become known as during the Roman period, even though these were probably administration entities that emerged in the Roman period, and do not necessarily reflect the tribal names or boundaries of the later Iron Age.