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University of Reading archaeologists have found evidence that Iron Age people in Britain were spicing up meals with foods and seasoning imported from around the Mediterranean. Previously it had been assumed that prior to the Roman occupation of Britain, only liquid products such as olive oil and wine were imported from across the Channel. However archaeologists working at Silchester Roman Town in Hampshire have discovered that people of that time were importing Mediterranean seasoning as well as whole olives themselves....

...The banal seeds are astonishing because many came from a level dating to a century before the Romans. More evidence is emerging every day, and it is clear that from around 50BC the Iron Age Atrebates tribe, whose name survived in the Latin Calleva Atrebatum, the wooded place of the Atrebates, enjoyed a lifestyle that would have been completely familiar to the Romans when they arrived in AD43. Their diet would also be quite familiar to many in 21st-century Britain. The people ate shellfish – previously thought to have been eaten only in coastal settlements – as well as cows,...

Archaeological dig at abandoned Roman city in Hampshire yields earliest representation of an Egyptian deity found in Britain... A battered and corroded thumb -- sized piece of bronze has turned out to be a unique find, the earliest representation of an Egyptian deity from any site in Britain -- and appropriately, after almost 2,000 years hidden in the ground, it is Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence. The little figure was found at Silchester, site of an abandoned Roman city in Hampshire, in last summer's excavation, but his identity was only revealed in months of careful conservation work. His...

Archaeologists believe they have found the first pre-Roman planned town discovered in Britain.It has been unearthed beneath the Roman town of Silchester or Calleva Atrebatum near modern Reading. The Romans are often credited with bringing civilisation to Britain - including town planning. But excavations have shown evidence of an Iron Age town built on a grid and signs inhabitants had access to imported wine and olive oil. Prof Mike Fulford, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, said the people of Iron Age Silchester appear to have adopted an urbanised 'Roman' way of living, long before the Romans arrived. "It...

Iron Age Britons were importing olives from the Mediterranean a century before the Romans arrived with their exotic tastes in food, say archaeologists who have discovered a single olive stone from an excavation of an Iron Age well at at Silchester in Hampshire. The stone came from a layer securely dated to the first century BC, making it the earliest ever found in Britain -- but since nobody ever went to the trouble of importing one olive, there must be more, rotted beyond recognition or still buried. The stone, combined with earlier finds of seasoning herbs such as coriander, dill...