Excavations at the Roman cemetery at Brougham have now been published as a Britannia monograph. Use this link to buy the book from Amazon or click on the picture .

It is a remarkable story, not only of the excavation conditions, but of the long struggle to get the site published and the lives of the inhabitants of third century Brougham that have been revealed in amazing detail.

The cemetery lies to the east of Brougham castle, once in the county of Westmoreland, now in Cumbria. In 1966 and 1967 part of the cemetery was excavated during the straightening of the A66. Excavations were directed by Dorothy Charlesworth on behalf of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. It is the largest cemetery ever to have been dug in the Roman north.

Excavation conditions were extreme, as the excavation was carried out in advance and sometimes during a major road-building project. Finds included horse bones in the pyre debris and the biers were decorated with elaborate bone veneers.

My contribution was to create a catalogue on CD for the excavation, based on XML and Javascript. The excavation report is available from Amazon - see box on right.