‘Roman Agricultural Diffusion’, a northern perspective: new crop plants in Yorkshire (UK) during the 1st millennia BCE and CE

The Roman annexation of northern Britain in the 1st c. CE correlates with the emergence of a diverse range of economically and culturally significant plants in the region; a process now framed in the Mediterranean as Roman agricultural diffusion (or RAD). This paper presents a systematic analysis of those plants introduced during the Roman period, contextualized through changes in the broader timeframe, 1st millennium BCE and CE. Plants are broken down into use-based (functional) categories and their presence systematically reviewed. Two distinct peaks are evident in the frequency of collated crop records, the first associated with the Roman period and the second associated with the period of Scandinavian settlement. Dataset biases are discussed to contextualise the representativeness of the region’s archaeobotanical record and its ability to reflect historical processes.