The Foulness Island site refers to a Romano-British cemetery and associated occupation traces on the low-lying coastal marshland of the Thames estuary in southeast Essex. Activity here is broadly dated to the 2nd–4th centuries AD, fitting the pattern of dispersed rural and salt-working communities that exploited the Essex coastal zone during the Roman period.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site sits within a landscape dominated by salt production (the "Red Hills" of coastal Essex) and small-scale agriculture, suggesting the cemetery served a community engaged in salt extraction, fishing, and pastoral farming on the saltmarsh — an economically important but socially marginal part of the civitas of the Trinovantes. Its position confirms that Foulness, though remote, was integrated into the wider rural economy supplying inland centres such as Chelmsford (Caesaromagus) and Colchester (Camulodunum).
Specific published excavation detail for this cemetery is limited; recorded finds from Foulness and the adjacent marshes include Romano-British pottery scatters, briquetage from salt-working, and burials encountered through fieldwalking and erosion of the foreshore, much of it documented by the Foulness Archaeological Society and Essex HER. No substantial structured excavation report comparable to inland Essex cemeteries (e.g. Great Dunmow or Mucking) is known to me for this specific location.
The Foulness Island site refers to a Romano-British cemetery and associated occupation traces on the low-lying coastal marshland of the Thames estuary in southeast Essex. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a cemetery site from the Roman period in Britain.
Romano-British burial site on Foulness Island is classified as a Roman cemetery — 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 Romano-British site N of Pound Wood, Thundersley (16.1 km), Roman Fort at Hadleigh (17.6 km), Othona (18.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Romano-British burial site on Foulness Island