Everything about The Durotriges totally explained
The
Durotriges were one of the
Celtic tribes living in the British Islands prior to the
Roman invasion of Britain. The tribe lived in modern
Dorset, south
Wiltshire and south
Somerset. After the Roman conquest, their main
civitates or cites were
Durnovaria (modern
Dorchester) and
Lindinis (modern
Ilchester).
The Durotriges were more a tribal confederation than a tribe. They were one of the few groups that issued coinage before the Roman conquest, part of the cultural "periphery", as
Barry Cunliffe characterised them, round the "core group" of Britons in the south. These coins were rather simple and had no inscriptions, and thus no names of coin-issuers can be known, let alone evidence about monarchs or rulers. Nevertheless, the Durotriges presented a settled society, based in the farming of lands surrounded and controlled by strong hill forts that were still in use in
43 AD.
Maiden Castle is a preserved example of one of these hill forts.
The area of the Durotriges is identified in part by coin finds: few Durotrgan coins are found in the "core" area, where they were apparently unacceptable and were reminted. To their north and east were the
Atrebates, beyond the
Avon and its tributary
Wylye. The
New Forest may have provided a buffer zone, as dense forest on the Continent did. Their main outlet for the trade across the Channel, strong in the first half of the first century BC, when the
potter's wheel was introduced, then drying up in the decades before the advent of the Romans, was at
Hengistbury Head. Numismatic evidence shows progressive debasing of the coinage, suggesting economic retrenchment accompanying the increased cultural isolation. Analysis of the body of Durotrigan ceramics suggests to Cunliffe that the production was increasingly centralised, at
Poole Harbour (Cunliffe 2005:183). Burial of Durotriges was by
inhumation, with a last ritual meal provided even under exiguous circumstances, as in the eight burials at Maiden Castle, carried out immediately after the Roman attack.
Not surprisingly, the Durotriges resisted Roman invasion in AD 43, and the historian
Suetonius records some fights between the tribe and the
second legion Augusta, then commanded by
Vespasian. By 70 AD, the tribe was already Romanised and securely included in the
Roman province of
Britannia. In the tribe’s area, the Romans explored some quarries and supported a local pottery industry.
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