It is necessary to depart from the more conventional linear route to an analysis of towns in the later Roman period by turning to an earlier period in the use of these sites. The processes that created urbanisation in Roman Britain occurred in the context of pre-existing places and became part of them, as well as bringing new aspects of land use and organisation; the sequence of activity at these places continued into the late Roman period and sometimes beyond. It has been emphasised that ways of understanding land would have been different in the past and factors such as religious belief would have played a much more significant role in this experience than they do today. This chapter examines some of the evidence reflecting the meanings of the places prior to Roman urban development.

Many of the locations in which the Roman towns were placed were already socially important. Even if there was no direct link between them and the Roman towns through to the later Roman period, they form an important analogy of ways of conceptualising late urbanism differently. According to Lemaire (1997: 7), ‘in non-Western and pre-modern cultures there is a mythical space in which places are qualitatively different and meaningful referring to a sacred cosmos in which the human world is participating’ (cf. Moore 2007: 90).