The Green Bay site on Bryher, one of the Isles of Scilly, preserves a relict prehistoric field system overlain or adjacent to a Romano-British cist burial, exposed intermittently along the eroding intertidal zone between Bryher and Tresco. The field boundaries (low stone lynchets and walls) belong to the Bronze Age agricultural landscape now partly submerged by post-prehistoric sea-level rise, while the cist indicates continued or renewed use of the area into the early centuries AD.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site is part of the wider evidence that Scilly remained an inhabited, farming archipelago through the Roman period, integrated peripherally into the Atlantic seaways rather than into the Roman provincial administration. Green Bay is especially valuable because it preserves a stratified relationship between submerged prehistoric agriculture and later funerary activity, illustrating long-term landscape continuity on the islands.
A Romano-British cist grave at Green Bay was investigated following coastal erosion (notably work by Charles Johns and the Cornwall Archaeological Unit in the 2000s), producing the remains of an inhumation associated with a small assemblage including a glass bead, set within the intertidal field system of stone-built boundaries. Beyond this, the cemetery context is limited, and the full extent of associated settlement remains undefined, with ongoing erosion the principal source of new evidence.
The Green Bay site on Bryher, one of the Isles of Scilly, preserves a relict prehistoric field system overlain or adjacent to a Romano-British cist burial, exposed intermittently along the eroding intertidal zone between Bryher and Tresco. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Prehistoric field system and Romano-British cist in Green Bay, Bryher is classified as a Roman site — 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 Prehistoric settlement, Romano-British cist cemetery and Civil War battery in northern Toll's Porth, St Mary's (3.7 km), Iron Age to Romano-British fogou on northern Peninnis Head, 170m south of Carn Gwavel Farm, St Mary's (5.4 km), Prehistoric to Romano-British ritual, funerary and settlement remains on Par Beach, St Martin's (5.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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