FOR an archaeologist such as Samuel Lysons (1763–1819), the Cotswolds was a good place to be born. By the 4th century AD, the area had acquired the highest concentration of villas for the Romano-British elite in the country. Woodchester was the largest of them, having 64 rooms and three courts, and Lysons’s excavation of it in 1793 established his reputation. It was one of many digs from which finds were sumptuously published after his drawings or with etchings made by himself. The best of the artefacts were among those he gave to the British Museum, founding its Romano-British collection.
The term archaeologist is, of course, an anachronism; a younger friend of Horace Walpole, Lysons was proud to call himself an antiquarian. Archaeology—a word that had only recently come into currency—then meant the study and display of ancient objects, not the broad study of places or culture by forensically analysing what remains. Today’s more rigorous archaeologists can be dismissive of his work, with its emphasis on making spectacular finds rather than diligently exploring the layers
