The frustrated cry of the young Barry Cunliffe has an odd echo in these days of preservation in situ. Sitting in the Roman Baths on his first visit as a schoolboy in 1955, he was astonished at how much was unknown about the Baths, despite their international reputation: large areas ‘surrounded by big question marks . . . all around . . . the word ‘‘unexcavated’’ ’ (Cunliffe 1984: xiii; figure 1). His later understanding of the realities and constraints of excavation only sharpened his desire to know more. Now, fifty years on and more, due in large part to that drive to know, his curiosity, we can claim to have made as much progress in our understanding of the baths and the city around them as had occurred in all the years before his visit, a history of archaeological enquiry stretching back over 400 years. In 1955 the baths were much as they had been discovered in the 1880s and 1890s. They were not well understood. The town, or city, or whatever surrounded it, were almost completely unknown, or at best, misunderstood. It was still possible in that year to argue that the temple of Sulis Minerva was on the north of the King’s Bath, not, as records of earlier discoveries made clear, on the west (Richmond and Toynbee 1955). Yet as the young Cunliffe sat and mused, the archaeological world was beginning to take note and a modern excavation campaign was beginning; indeed had begun: Professor Ian Richmond, in a short eight years to become a colleague, had started ‘his patient and elegant exploration of the East Baths’ the summer before (Cunliffe 1969: v). Richmond initiated a small number of very limited investigations into the East Baths, elucidating a tangle of remains that, while clearly the result of a succession of alterations and archaeological phases, had never been adequately analysed. Richmond’s main aim was to understand the developmental history of the baths, and this approach, combined with a thoughtful and thorough study of the rest of the remains, led to a still broadly accepted phasing and functional analysis (Cunliffe 1969).
