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Stop calling every buried wall a 'Roman road' in site reports
I keep seeing field reports from small digs in the UK label any straight stone line as Roman. Spoke to a surveyor in York last month who flagged 3 separate sites with the same issue. Those are often medieval drainage or 18th century field boundaries. We don't need more fake claims muddying the record for actual researchers. Has anyone else run into this at a local dig?
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aaron74013d ago
Wait, you mean someone actually told you that to your face and then just went back to labeling things? That is wild, I thought we were past this whole thing by now. Honestly I saw a report last year from a site in Somerset where they called a flint scatter a Roman marching camp, and the guy who wrote it doubled down when someone questioned him at a meeting. It drives me nuts because once it is in the written record, some other poor sod will cite it for years and build fake ideas on top of it. The drainage thing is spot on too, I have seen old field drains that look way too straight and neat to be anything but deliberate. If people would just spend ten minutes checking the local enclosure maps or farm records, they would save everyone a headache. We need better training for volunteers or whoever is writing these things up, not more guesswork.
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