My current project involves the analysis and reporting of work in the Roman ‘small town’ at Dorchester-on-Thames, focussed on a site examined over a ten-year period as a training excavation for Oxford undergraduates and others. This small site lay close to the centre of the Roman settlement and has features from the late pre-Roman Iron Age and early Roman military periods onwards, with aspects of a potentially seamless late Roman to early Anglo-Saxon sequence of particular importance. Lacking substantial structures, a marked characteristic of the site is very substantial artefact and animal bone assemblages. Working through this material is therefore a significant part of the project. My specific responsibilities are to deal with stratigraphic analysis and reporting on the pottery and coins, and to combine these aspects and other specialist contributions into a report that places the site in its regional and (where appropriate) national context. My related interests are in all aspects of the Roman archaeology of the region and beyond, and another current piece of work concerns the assessment of site status based on key characteristics of pottery assemblages in the area.
