Profile

Biography

Steve Roskams joined the staff in 1983 after spending ten years in rescue archaeology, directing excavations in Carthage in Tunisia and in the City of London, notably the large excavations at Billingsgate.

Research

Overview

He is interested in all aspects of urban archaeology, both of theory and of practice. The former involve the construction, from a Marxist perspective, of frameworks for understanding the Roman to medieval transitions; the latter the development of excavation methods and analysis to aid the interpretation of complex urban sequences.

Publications include site reports and synthetic articles on London, overviews of Roman and medieval York, and books on fieldwork methodologies and stratigraphic analysis.

At the present time he is completing the publication of a major research project focused on the Roman town of Lambaesis in Algeria.

Current projects

• Yorkshire Wolds Project - a multiperiod landscape investigation.
• Lambaesis, Algeria - a Roman town and its hinterland.
• The Yorkshire Archaeological Research Assessment gathering data on archaeological resources in the region and producing a research framework.
• Mothecombe Fieldwork Project - survey and excavation of the early medieval 'beach market' site in South Devon

Collaborators

Sam Turner, working together on the Mothecombe Project

Publications

Selected publications

• 2007 (with Mark Whyman) "Categorising the Past: lessons from the archaeological resource assessment for Yorkshire" Internet Archaeology 23
• 2006 "The urban poor: finding the marginalised" in W Bowden et al. (eds) Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity (Late Antique Archaeology, Vol 3.1) (Brill, Leiden/Boston), 487-531
• 2003 Teoria y Practica de la Excavacion (Spanish translation of CUP book on Excavation) (Critica Arqueologia, Barcelona)
• 2001 (with Tom Saunders): "The poverty of empiricism and the tyranny of theory" in U Albarella (ed) Environmental Archaeology: meaning and purpose (Kluwer, Dordrecht/Boston/London)
• 2001: Excavation (Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology) (CUP, Cambridge)

Teaching

External activities

Memberships

• advisor to aspects of the work of the York Archaeological Trust and the Carlisle Archaeological Unit
• advisor on the Urban Research Committee of the Council for British Archaeology and the British Academy's Tunisia Committee
• Chair of the York Archaeological Forum: advises York City Council on archaeological matters
• Yorkshire Forum (organising seminars and conference publications)
• Yorkshire Archaeological Research Framework Forum

Editorial duties

• Editor of conference proceedings for the Interpreting Stratigraphy Group