Who were the people of Roman Staffordshire?
Most people lived in the countryside and carried on their agricultural way of life much the same as they did before the Romans invaded. Some people were forced into slavery and were transported to other parts of the empire to work for the wealthy. Many slaves had very hard lives, although some were well-treated and later freed by their masters. Slavery was not new however, it had been common throughout the Iron Age. The wealthy and influential were in the minority, but it is their ‘Romanised’ culture that we see most often. Can archaeology bring us closer to the people? The answer is yes and no. Most of the artefacts found by archaeologists belonged to the society’s elite, who would have had little in common with the majority of people who lived in Roman Britain – the poorer peasants. We often only find artefacts that belonged to the wealthy, such as their jewellery, fine pottery and glass, their stone and brick-built houses and graves. Sometimes there are more mysterious finds such as
