Professor Rob Collins

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696 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 28 May

Professor Rob Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · The Fall of Hadrian's Wall · 28 May 2026 podcast

And a key thing here is if we look at the archeological traces, set aside the architectural presumptions for a moment, if we just look at the material culture, the artifacts, the artifact assemblages are very similar between what we find in those elite hill forts of the fifth and sixth centuries and in Roman forts.

We're finding metal dress accessories, some brooches.

We're finding fragments of glass, sometimes what might be glass vessels that are still intact, and probably relics and antiques, but still glass vessels.

Larger structures of just larger scale.

evidence of metal working and other craft working.

Yeah.

I mean, the weapons we see often look to be Roman, but this raises other questions, I think, culturally.

So if we think in a more general sense, those former Roman forts, whether we still call them Roman forts is a debate, but they're still an elite fortified settlement.

And

the Romans located those forts at very strategic locations in the landscape.

Furthermore, those forts have been embedded in supply lines for centuries.

So there's already a very good practice of bringing supplies to that fort.

That will be the local farmers as well as perhaps longer distance craftsmen and merchants.

There's a lot of advantages to residing in a Roman fort in the fifth century, regardless of your ancestry, whether or not your father and grandfather and whether or not they were soldiers there.

it almost doesn't matter because actually some of the infrastructure that's there already makes that an advantageous position.

Yeah, there's a definite hybrid sort of architectural style.

And that is happening all across Roman Britain.

It's not just a phenomenon in the forts.

And so the example, the fantastic example detected through some very excellent, careful archaeology and thinking by Tony Wilmot at Port Oswalds,

is this transformation of the Horea, the granaries, which we think of these kind of quintessential buildings of the Roman army, these big warehouses.

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