Professor Rob Collins

It's always good to get people up into the Roman frontier.

There we go.

Very definitive no.

It keeps going.

It is.

I mean, it's a period I've fallen in love with, right?

It's my career choice, my career focus.

But there are so many questions.

There's so many mysteries, so many unknowns.

There's lots of puzzles to solve.

And what is fantastic is all the scientific breakthroughs and insights and developments we've had over the past generation.

Each year brings us closer to new techniques that we can start applying and addressing to these research problems.

Absolutely.

I think you have to start.

If you're looking at kind of 5th, 6th century Britain, you've got this clash or this transition between two really big historical ideas and concepts in British history.

So you've got the ending of Roman Britain, and that's a big idea in itself.

It kind of ties into things of like the end of civilization.

And then coming along, not right away, some decades, maybe centuries later, you've got the birth of Anglo-Saxon England.

So in terms of an English national myth,

So you've got the ending of one really important part of Britain's history, and you've got the beginning of another important part.