1800 years ago, on the edge of the Fens, a farming community is in full swing...

This everyday scene shows the Roman period settlement at Langdale Hale, Colne Fen, near Earith, as it may have looked at around 200 AD. Excavations here and at other sites in Colne Fen by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit have revealed what life was like during Roman times in this part of Cambridgeshire.

The Roman Empire conquered Britain in 43 AD and ruled the island until the early 5th century AD. During these four centuries, life changed dramatically. Before the conquest, people lived in small farming communities. Under Roman rule, people for the first time learned to read and write and to live in towns. At first, there was some resistance to Roman ways, but people gradually came to 'be Roman' by adopting new styles of clothing, foods, religious ideas, and so on. As they were now part of a huge empire, stretching across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, people had more contact with different cultures and exotic goods. British people travelled overseas, and people from as far away as Greece and Syria came to Britain to live and work.

In Cambridgeshire, towns grew up after the Roman conquest at Cambridge, at Godmanchester near Huntingdon and at Water Newton near Peterborough, but most people continued to live in rural farms and villages. The two Roman sites recently excavated at Earith are important examples of long-lived rural settlements. At Langdale Hale a farm has been found dating from the 1st to the 4th century AD (see picture). At the Camp Ground, about 600 metres away, a much larger village with many streets and houses has been excavated, dating from the 2nd to 4th century AD. This was probably an important local market centre that can be set alongside the small town found elsewhere in the Fens at Stonea.

The large scale of the excavations has made it possible to understand the wider landscape setting of the settlements. The area would have looked very different in Roman times from today. The settlements were located on the edge of the Fens. In the Roman period the Fens were a wet, marshy area. People could not easily live there. But the edge of the Fens was a good place to live. People could graze their cattle and sheep on the marshy fenlands during the summer, while they were living and growing crops on the drier land nearby. Excavations have shown that the area around the Earith settlements was divided up into fields for growing crops and paddocks for keeping farm animals.

The location of the Earith settlements was also good for communications. People could use the waterways of the Fens to travel by boat. The Roman canal called the Car Dyke was nearby. This means that although the community at Earith was rural, it was not isolated. Many of the objects found at the Earith settlements come from different parts of Britain, or even from overseas.

In some ways, the people who lived at Earith in Roman times were similar to us. Many parts of their lives seem familiar to us - they farmed, used coins, bought things in markets, and so on. But this can be misleading, as in other ways, people in Roman times were very different from people today.