Overview of pottery in Gloucester and its immediate hinterland - Jane Timby

Study Group for Roman Pottery 2025 Conference – Gloucester (UK) 6th-8th June 2025, @ The Folk of Gloucester & Museum of Gloucester

Saturday 7th June

Over the last few decades the city of Gloucester and its suburbs have yielded several tons of Roman pottery. Unfortunately one of the big problems for Gloucester is the large amount of unpublished and unsynthesised material that has accrued over the years. Growing evidence suggests that the landscape was relatively densely occupied in the later Iron Age with a number of
small scale settlements using largely locally produced wares. This all changed with the arrival of the Roman army, first to Kingsholm in the Neronian period, subsequently moving to Gloucester City in the later 1st century. Around AD 98 the city became a colonia for retired veterans developing into a standard Roman urban centre with the benefit of being a river port and continued to thrive through into at least the later 4th-early 5th centuries.
With the arrival of the army the pottery assemblage becomes Romanised; a diverse range of continental imports appear and at least five production sites were established within and outside
the city in the 1st and early 2nd centuries. Added to this was the rapid expansion of the Severn Valley industry supplying both Gloucester and the wider region and in the mid-later Roman period a development of a new regional industry in the Lower Severn Valley.