Every stone at the Roman Baths has a story to tell. As Director of Archaeology and Art, Amanda Hart is uncovering the forgotten lives of the ordinary people who built, worked and worshipped there – revealing a richer, more human history of the city. Interview by Melissa Blease
Pictured above: Amanda Hart beside the Great Bath
Whether you’re a long-term resident of the Heritage City or visiting Bath just for one day, it’s impossible to ignore the history that’s all around us at every turn – and never more so than around and within the Roman Baths complex, where the city began.
The Romans started the development of Aquae Sulis as a sanctuary of rest and relaxation in 43AD. Over the next three decades, they built a temple dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva and a sophisticated series of baths constructed around the natural hot springs which thrived at the epicentre of proceedings and was gradually built up over the next 300 years – and indeed, continues to be developed some 1500 years on.
“The Roman Baths is unique because of its historical setting,” says Amanda Hart, who was appointed Director of Archaeology and Art at the Roman Baths in 2022.
“But if you pause to consider the scale of what was originally a huge leisure complex and the amount of people it would have taken, operationally, to keep that site running – wow, it would have been a phenomenal task! But the stories of all the people involved in that task behind the scenes aren’t fully told on site; there are many different narratives that we need to draw out to make the history of the Roman Baths a complete story.”
For me, nothing beats the experience of being by the Great Bath before we open to the public… it’s just – well, beautiful; you can really sense the magical, spiritual nature of the site here.”
If anybody is going to help those people tell that story it’s Amanda, whose love of European pre-history began when she relocated from Australia to the UK with her family as a pre-teen and led to her studying Archaeology for her degree before specialising in Archaeological Curatorship at MA level. Today, Amanda is studying for a PhD looking at the human skeletal remains found in and around Bath with a view to creating osteobiographies (lifestyle, occupation, demographics, etc) of the lived experience of those individuals.
“Research around the people involved in the building and maintenance of the Roman Baths complex has so far been based on inscription evidence on tombstones and altars. But of course, they only really represent the mostly male, elite Romans, so there are a whole lot of people that aren’t represented,” she explains.
As part of her research, Amanda and her team are also looking at Epigraphy, the scientific study of inscriptions, to reanalyse the Roman Baths’ collection of Curse Tablets, the curiously moving ‘defixiones’ inscribed on to small sheets of lead or pewter depicting the private and personal prayers and wishes of 130 individuals believed to have worked on the site from the second to the late fourth century AD.
“Of course, we all know the Romans spoke Latin, but elements in new technology have opened doors to a reanalysis of the Curse Tablets from the perspective of other languages,” says Amanda. “There would have been both local people and incomers from abroad that were speaking a range of different Celtic and other languages, so we’re going to look for those as well, working closely with Professor Alex Mullen, Professor of Ancient History and Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham.”
It’s all quite the impressive workload, for sure. But while busy making big splashes and multi-faceted deep dives poised to reshape the fascinating social history within one of the most popular, award-winning tourist destinations in the UK, Amanda still finds time to appreciate her unique ‘office’ environment. “For me, nothing beats the experience of being by the Great Bath before we open to the public,” she says. “It’s just – well, beautiful; you can really sense the magical, spiritual nature of the site here.”
This month, we can all immerse ourselves in a little bit of Roman Baths magic when the Summer Lates sessions allows visitors to enjoy the Great Bath in the soft glow of torchlight as the sun sets, with a Bath-side bar open until 10pm and live, mellow music on Friday-Sunday evenings adding to the unique ambience. “At dusk, all the beautiful colours of the summertime sunset reflect on the bath; it’s a very special time to visit,” says Amanda. “And in a way, Summer Lates takes us back to the Roman Baths original purpose; as well as being a centre for wellness, it was a very social space, where people would go to chat to people, catch up on news, socialise, gossip, see and be seen!”
Okay, so in these modern times, we’re not allowed to actually bathe – and nor are we allowed to consider visiting naked, as the original visitors would have done. As for tasting the mineral-rich spring waters that 17th century health-seekers travelled from far and wide to do (and which today’s visitors can still do, courtesy of dedicated taps and fountains with the modern-day complex): don’t even go there! It is, as Amanda very politely, puts it, “an acquired taste”.
The Roman Baths, though, we should all dive in: Bath’s own, unique history on our very own doorsteps, being revived, revised and recurated for generations to come.
Summer Lates at the Roman Baths:
romanbaths.co.uk/event/summer-lates-roman-baths
For more on the Voices of Britain project:
bajr.org/voices-of-britain-under-and-after-rome-early-british-identities
Photography by Joe Short, an award-winning
photographer based in Bath. joeshort.com