Beyond soldiers, forts and battles
Much of the surviving evidence for Roman Scotland is military.
Forts, camps, weapons, inscriptions and frontier works dominate the archaeological record.
But the people who occupied those forts still had to eat, sleep, wash, work, repair their clothes, look after children, worship gods, treat illness and dispose of rubbish.
Around the soldiers were officers’ households, women, children, servants, traders and craftspeople. Beyond the forts were the local communities whose lives continued while Roman armies moved through their landscape.
Archaeology allows us to recover some of that everyday world.
Teaching this topic? Explore Everyday life, trade and withdrawal for CfE Second Level (P5–P7), with activities and an editable teacher pack.
Life inside a Roman fort
For an ordinary soldier, home was usually a barrack block.
Groups of soldiers shared rooms and lived within a highly organised military environment centred on the headquarters building.
But forts contained much more than barracks.
There were granaries for food, workshops for making and repairing equipment, stables for horses, administrative buildings and sometimes hospitals.
The commanding officer lived rather differently, usually in a substantial residence known as the praetorium.
Explore how a Roman fort worked
Women and children
Roman Scotland was not an exclusively male world.
Inscriptions preserve the names of only a handful of women, but footwear tells a very different story.
Shoes recovered at forts including Bar Hill, Camelon, Castlecary and elsewhere belonged to women, children and even babies.
Some may have lived in settlements outside the forts. Other evidence suggests that the distinction between the military space inside the fort and family life outside it may not always have been as rigid as once imagined.
Food
Food occupied a large part of daily life.
Soldiers needed huge quantities of grain, while the Roman army brought supply networks extending far beyond Scotland.
At Bearsden, remains recovered from sewage include wheat, barley, beans, lentils, figs, coriander, dill, celery, hazelnuts and several local berries.
Amphorae show that wine, olive oil and fish-based products also travelled north.
Cooking and pottery
Meals required equipment.
Archaeologists find:
- cooking pots
- mortaria for grinding and mixing
- bowls and dishes
- amphorae
- drinking vessels
- samian tableware
Pottery is particularly useful because different styles and fabrics can reveal where goods were produced and how soldiers had previously lived.
At Bearsden and elsewhere on the Antonine Wall, some pottery shows North African influences in cooking styles, although the vessels themselves could have been manufactured locally.
Bathing
Bathing was both practical and social.
Bathhouses attached to Scottish forts contained sequences of cold, warm and hot rooms heated using Roman underfloor heating.
Bearsden preserves one of Scotland’s best-known Roman bathhouses.
It included a changing room, cold bath, heated rooms and a hot dry room.
Bathing provided soldiers with somewhere to wash, relax and socialise after military duties.
Going to the toilet
Roman military toilets could be communal.
At Bearsden the stone-built latrine had room for about nine people at once.
Waste water from the bathhouse helped flush the sewage channel.
The contents of the latrine have proved enormously valuable to archaeologists because they preserve traces of what the soldiers ate — and the parasites living inside them.
Hygiene was not always healthy
Bathhouses, drains and flushing toilets look impressive.
They should not be mistaken for modern sanitation.
Analysis at Bearsden revealed whipworm and roundworm, showing that intestinal parasites remained part of everyday life.
A human flea was also recovered.
The Romans possessed sophisticated infrastructure, but they did not understand bacteria, viruses or how many diseases spread.
Work
A Roman fort depended upon skilled workers.
There were people making and repairing:
weapons, leather goods, shoes, pottery, timber buildings, carts, metal fittings and equipment.
Pottery kilns are known at several Antonine sites, and evidence for ironworking has also been found.
Cramond provides evidence for leather workers, shoemakers, builders and other skilled trades associated with the fort.
Glass
Glass was both practical and a sign of Roman material culture.
Fragments of vessels occur on Roman sites, while Cramond is particularly notable for buildings with glazed windows.
Glass could also be recycled.
Religion
Religion was woven into daily life.
People prayed for health, victory, safety and good fortune.
Altars from Scotland invoke Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Minerva, Hercules, Diana, Apollo and many other gods.
Some deities came from Rome.
Others came from the Rhine, Danube or eastern Empire.
Others combined Roman and local traditions.
Life outside the fort
Forts did not stand alone.
Settlements developed around at least some of them.
These could contain shops, workshops, inns, shrines and homes.
At Carriden there is evidence for an organised civilian community, while tombstones at Shirva reveal people living and dying around Auchendavy.
Roman Scotland was therefore more than a collection of military installations.
It was a short-lived but complicated frontier society.
Local people
At the same time, most people in Scotland did not live in Roman forts.
They continued to inhabit farms, roundhouses and other indigenous settlements.
Roman arrival could create conflict, but it could also create opportunities for exchange.
Research at Loch Clunie near Inchtuthil suggests local agricultural production continued through Agricola’s campaigns and may even have benefited from supplying the nearby Roman army.
Roman Impact on Farming at Loch Clunie
Reconstructing everyday life
One of the difficulties with Roman Scotland is that the things which survive best are not necessarily the things which mattered most to everyday people.
Stone inscriptions survive better than clothes.
Pottery survives better than food.
Weapons survive better than children’s toys.
Forts survive better than conversations.
Archaeologists therefore build the picture from thousands of small clues.
A shoe.
A broken bowl.
A parasite egg.
A charred grain.
A scratched name.
Together, they bring daily life in Roman Scotland back into view.
