>>695668The city of Viroconium Cornoviorum (or Uriconium or modern Wroxeter) was the civitas capital of the Cornovii after the R*man Empire conquered the tribe. First it was a military base then it became the civitas then a full on municipal city.
So the important part is that the people who excavated it from the 60s to the 90s had this schizo theory that the city was still occupied into the 7th or 8th centuries (which is ridiculous). This would be strange since EVERY single city in Britain was abandoned around the time the R*man $ettler$ left. There was no urban life in Britain until the Anglo Saxons started it again, at most there were people living inside the ruins of cities, but not large populations.
The idea is that there was still a Roman population living in Uriconium at this extremely late date. Really fanciful theories were made of like dozens of massive houses and, most importantly, a really big building (building 10) at the site of the old baths basillica (the Romans turned part of the baths into a new Basillica after the old one burned down). At the end of the sequence the Roman population in like 700 AD took the whole place down and left, probably because they didn't want anything to do with the Anglo Saxons.
The proof of this is non existant. There is no evidence any of this existed. The basis for building 10 is that a rubble platform *might* have been made, but it is really difficult to tell because THE WHOLE PLACE HAS BEEN CUT THROUGH BY ROBBER TRENCHES SINCE THE ANGLO SAXON TIMES!!! It's all just a fanciful idea but there is no material evidence at all apart from some scant carbon dates (the Frigidarium of the baths I think was still in use at this point). The joke around building 10 is that Barker made these really fun and completely ridiculous illustrations (pic rel) of what this massive Roman engineered 3 story building with towers (during a time when everyone lived in huts) and this late antique Uriconium must have looked like and people just sort of belived it because he was a nice person who did a really groundbreaking excavation of the Roman city, not because he was right. There were literally no other cities in Britain that survived the 5th century btw so this would be insanely rare if it did. The answer to lack of evidence and lack of diagnostic material culture like imported pottery? It was all made of
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