Dragonby was a substantial native settlement in north Lincolnshire, occupied from the middle Iron Age through into the Roman period (roughly 3rd century BC to 4th century AD). It developed from an enclosed Iron Age farming community into a sprawling, nucleated Romano-British settlement on the Lincolnshire limestone edge, with rectilinear stone-founded buildings, lanes, and enclosures replacing earlier roundhouses by the 2nd century AD.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site is significant as one of the best-documented examples of continuity from a Late Iron Age Corieltauvian centre into a thriving Roman rural settlement, sitting within an iron-working landscape near the Humber and the road between Lincoln (Lindum) and Winteringham. It produced Iron Age coinage and imported pre-conquest goods, indicating it was a place of some status before the Roman arrival.
Large-scale excavations by Jeffrey May between 1964 and 1973, published in 1996, revealed long stratigraphic sequences including timber roundhouses, later stone-footed rectangular buildings, extensive ironworking debris (slags and furnaces), Iron Age and Roman coinage, brooches, and substantial assemblages of imported pottery including Dressel 1 amphorae and early samian. The site is particularly valuable for its well-stratified ceramic sequence spanning the Late Iron Age–Roman transition
Dragonby was a substantial native settlement in north Lincolnshire, occupied from the middle Iron Age through into the Roman period (roughly 3rd century BC to 4th century AD). It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Dragonby is classified as a Roman settlement — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Money Field Roman site, Dragonby (0.3 km), Roxby (3.4 km), Winterton (4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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