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My name is Roger White and I work at the Ironbridge Institute but I also work here in Birmingham
on the campus as well, in Archaeology, and in fact my main research relates to a Roman
city in Shropshire where I live, and this is the fourth largest Roman town in Britain.
I first went there to work in 1976 and I'm still working on it. It's a huge site, very
complex, and what I like about archaeology is that you can really get in depth of a site.
You can... it's so complex, there's so much to learn about that site but on the surface
it looks very simple, the more you dig into it - literally - but also using the books
and the research, you get to really understand what's going on at that place and it gets
under your skin. It’s a terrific site but it is very understated, its difficult to approach
so it’s taken a long time to really understand it. And I'm still working on it, there's still
lots, lots to do. I was in the museum yesterday looking at finds which were discovered perhaps
80, 100 years ago which no-one has really looked at before and there's some terrific
artefacts there which really add to the story or Wroxeter. The other research that I do
is on industrial archaeology in Shropshire and Shropshire is full of industrial archaeology
- the famous sites are Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, and Jackfield where the pottery’s made,
but also less well known sites - I'm interested in Clee, where's theres a fantastic quarry
and mining landscape that stretches back for hundreds of years and it’s in a very very
dramatic setting. And that's what I like about archaeology too - that you can get out into
the landscape and really understand it and look at it and bring in all sorts of other
disciplines to unravel what's happening in that landscape.