Tale of Britain’s post-Roman economic crash overturned by ancient metal pollution discovery

Chemical analyses of an ancient river channel’s sediment at a Roman site in northern England have challenged a long-held view that Britain experienced economic collapse when Roman rule ended in AD410. Instead, the findings suggest metal production continued and only declined much later.

The village of Aldborough in North Yorkshire was once the prosperous Roman town of Isurium Brigantum in a region known for large-scale metal working, including iron and lead. While conducting an archaeological survey of the site over the past decade, researchers spotted a sediment sequence in a bore hole core from an ancient channel, which last flowed around 2000 years ago into the River Ure.