In 1955, Sheppard Frere, who has died aged 98, was appointed director of a new programme of excavations at Verulamium, the Roman city on the edge of St Albans, where a road-widening scheme was about to cut across the site. Today, such work would be undertaken by a professional unit, but that was not the case in the 50s and Frere had to organise a series of large-scale excavations, working in the summer months, mainly with volunteers.
These excavations, which ran from 1955 to 1961, were among the largest undertaken in Britain up to then. The outlines of the history of Verulamium had been established by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s, but Frere’s discoveries led to a substantial revision of Wheeler’s conclusions. In particular, he gave physical reality to the Roman description of the destruction of the city by Queen Boudicca’s army in AD60-61 with the discovery of thick layers of burnt material, the remains of the timber buildings that had been destroyed in the sack of the city.
He was also able to show that, far from being undefended at that time, the city had been enclosed by a substantial bank and ditch. Another important discovery concerned the end of the Roman period. The traditional date for the Romans relinquishing control of Britain is 410, but Frere discovered that in Verulamium, buildings of Roman type were being constructed for at least another half-century showing that, in that city at least, Roman customs and ideas continued for far longer than had previously been thought.
Frere was born at Graffham, West Sussex, son of Noel, a district commissioner in Sierra Leone, and his wife, Agnes (nee Sunderland). Originally trained as a classicist, first at Lancing college, West Sussex, and then at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he had just embarked on a career as a teacher when the second world war intervened. He spent the next five years in the Auxiliary Fire Service.
In 1945 he returned to Lancing as a housemaster, but his experience of archaeological excavations before the war led to his appointment as director of the rescue excavations at Canterbury. Canterbury, which was both a great medieval city and a Roman tribal capital, had been heavily bombed in the so-called Baedeker raids of 1942, and the opportunity was taken to excavate the bombed sites before rebuilding took place. The work was not easy, for the areas available were often small and involved working in deep trenches. But despite this, and the fact that he had a full-time post at Lancing, he was able to establish a detailed outline of the archaeology of the city, continuing to publish the results of his work over the next 30 years.
In 1954 he moved from Lancing to a lecturership in archaeology at Manchester University, and then, a year later, to a readership in the archaeology of the Roman provinces at the Institute of Archaeology of London University. He remained there until 1966, when he went to Oxford University as professor of the archaeology of the Roman Empire and a fellow of All Souls. He retired in 1983.
Until 1967, he was probably best known as an excavator, but in that year he published Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, a book that was to become the standard work on the subject for the next 30 years. Perhaps surprisingly, no detailed history of Roman Britain had been published since RG Collingwood’s Roman Britain and the English Settlements in 1936, and the intervening 30 years had seen profound developments in our understanding of all aspects of the subject.
Now, really for the first time, we had a clear and up-to-date history of Britain from the Roman conquest to the collapse of Roman control early in the fifth century AD, with detailed accounts of the military and civil development of the province. It brought together the new discoveries and ideas that had come from the development of aerial photography, and the great upsurge in excavations that had followed the end of the war. More than 30 years after it was first published, a revised edition appeared as the first volume of the Folio Society’s History of England.
The completion of his work at Verulamium left Frere free to excavate other sites, and the years that followed saw him working on Roman forts in the Welsh Marches, in East Anglia and in Scotland, and on one of his favourite sites, the Roman villa at Bignor in Sussex. Retirement in 1983 brought no reduction in the number of his publications, with an important book (with Frank Lepper) on the reliefs on Trajan’s Column appearing in 1988. These reliefs – to be seen not only in Rome, but by means of plaster casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London – are our greatest single source of information on the Roman imperial army in the field, but until then there had been no full discussion of them in English. Then came a series of volumes, written with Roger Tomlin, on the inscriptions of Roman Britain; an exemplary project that was of fundamental importance to our understanding of life in the province.
He always retained much of the outward formality that was common in academic circles in his younger days, but behind this was a warm and humorous man who inspired great affection in those who knew him well.
He was appointed CBE in 1976, elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971 and was an emeritus fellow of All Souls.
In 1961 he married Janet Hoare, who survives him, together with their son, Bartle, and daughter, Sarah.
• Sheppard Sunderland Frere, historian and archaeologist, born 23 August 1916; died 25 February 2015