ABSTRACT
Most accounts of the Iron Age in Northern Britain agree that the impact of Romanisation upon the native population was minimal. The fact that villas and urban settlements are comparatively rare in the north, to the point of non-existence in the forward frontier zone, and the fact that rural settlements, of a type indistinguishable from their pre-Roman precursors, seldom yield more than the odd scrap of Roman pottery, endorse this conclusion. Yet few commentators until recent years have tried even to define the concept of Romanisation or to ask what impact upon the native communities Roman annexation might have been expected to make. In the last decade, particularly prompted by the publication by Martin Millett of his The Romanization of Britain (1990), a younger generation of archaeologists, and not exclusively those whose principal concern is the archaeology of Roman Britain, has begun to examine the concept of Romanisation more critically in the context of theoretical concerns with the concept of identity, and how it might be expressed or identified archaeologically.
