ABSTRACT
Archaeological sites typically range from structures completely buried, of which there is no trace on the ground and that can only be detected by scientic
processes such as geophysical techniques, to structures not visible but represented by earthworks (‘humps and bumps’). However, it is the remains of only partly exhumed excavated structures that are the most visited by the public. Perhaps the most obvious example of this category of ‘low visibility sites’ in the United Kingdom are ‘Roman remains’, which usually occur in the countryside and are mainly of a military character. Though some villas and structures in urban areas are represented, pressure on land within towns – and the sequent occupation of these urban locations from the Romano-British period to the present – means that although excavation does take place, the recovered structural evidence is preserved by record and the site back-lled to be reused. In his inuential publication, Ruins: Their Preservation and Display, M.W. Thompson (1981, 22) dismisses this type of visual source in just two sentences:
However, since documentary evidence for the Roman period in Britain is scarce, we are conned to using the visual evidence of sites and artefacts from those sites, resulting in archaeology playing a larger role in reconstructing a history of the Roman period in Britain, whoever is constructing it (Mattingly 2006).
