ABSTRACT
Due to the close conceptual alignment of Roman urbanism with the modern world, there has been a tendency to separate the archaeological evidence of prehistory from the subsequent Roman period. While there have been recent efforts to acknowledge more complex continuities, this has not truly challenged archetypal aspects of towns like the water infrastructure, which is rarely interpreted as having a relationship to pre-Roman archaeology. This chapter examines some of Roman Britain’s most prominent towns in a series of case studies, considering how the urban water infrastructure of these settlements frequently overlapped and engaged with significant prehistoric traditions of the landscape. Indeed, the marked evidence of this activity in different areas of Britain creates a situation where familiar interpretations of urban water features are no longer appropriate. Instead, the chapter proposes that we should see Roman-period developments as distinct hybrids which are impossible to understand if separated from the meaning of their local landscape context.
