My idle hours reading is "Emperor of Rome" by Mary Beard. She's a good writer and is describing what it was like to be in charge of the Empire at the peak of its power.
What we are digging in these days is at the opposite end of things. Not Rome, but the absolute farthest frontier, with at best rustic and at worst hostile natives. And also, not a place of palaces and luxury, but by the end of days at Vindolanda, a more hardscrabble place. As such, the material culture of the buildings we are working was pretty crummy.
Here's the sort of very late pottery we are finding. Yuck.
Rome did not "fall" here, so much as stop paying the help. When your low morale, mostly locally recruited troops don't get paid, they revert to being just a batch of local lads with weapons. The post Roman era is harder to document, because those guys had very little in the way of goods. No more pottery being made. Not much trade with other areas. And what structures they cobbled together out of existing and repaired older stuff was right on top, and first in line to be....
Clobbered by farmers in the modern era. See the deep scratches in these stones? Each one caused by a plow hitting it as some poor guy tried to eke a living out of this thin soiled patch of rocks.
After of course they nicked a lot of the surviving good stones for their farm buildings.
Well, tomorrow is another day. When I get a bit closer to the wall shown above its likely there will be a bit more archaeology preserved. Most of what I worked today was just churned up plow soil with a few random bits of pulverized brick, and pot, as well as tiny fragments of glass from Roman times on up to not long ago.
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