The Romano-British villa and prehistoric settlement at Low Ham, Somerset

Abstract

This full publication of the Roman villa at Low Ham, Somerset (UK), brings together for the first time multiple pieces of research undertaken at the site over the past 80 years. Originally discovered in 1945 and famous for its Dido and Aeneas mosaic, work by H S L Dewar and C A Ralegh Radford revealed substantial sections of what is now known to be a large courtyard villa. R H Leech carried out landscape and aerial research in the 1970s, and having conferred with the original excavators, began a publication project. Successive geophysical surveys by Historic England in the early 2000s led to further excavation work in 2018, supervised by D Roberts. This volume contains a review of structural findings from the 1940s, the detailed stratigraphic sequence revealed in 2018, and specialist reports on the findings from both campaigns. It puts forward an integrated narrative of the villa structure, contextualises both the Roman and the newly discovered prehistoric archaeology, and includes a synthesis of the material culture and environmental evidence. The authors demonstrate the development of Low Ham from an unenclosed Middle to Late Iron Age settlement, through early Roman enclosure, to the establishment and development of one of the most elaborate and extensive 4th-century AD villas in Britannia.