Owing to a combination of incomplete publication and the relative paucity of large, well-dated sites with successive phases of occupation, most recent studies of artefact assemblages in Roman Britain have been at a regional or provincial resolution. Moreover, those who have attempted analysis within sites have often been limited to comparing disparate areas of large urban sites (e.g. Eckardt 2002; Monteil 2004), or artefact distributions and associations from a small number of broadly defined chronological phases (e.g. Meadows 1999). In this respect, the site of Elms Farm, Heybridge (Atkinson and Preston 1998) offers a virtually unique opportunity for intra-site analysis of patterns of consumption and deposition, as a non-urban site with multiple excavated areas and a particularly high resolution of ceramic phasing (seven phases in the period c. 50 BC-AD 210). The following study is based on doctoral research conducted by the author (Pitts 2005c) on pottery consumption and identity in Iron Age to Roman south-east Britain, in which the results of an earlier pilot study are presented Pitts (2004).
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