Professor Sheppard Sunderland Frere, CBE

Order of the British Empire

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

, FSA

Society of Antiquaries of London

The Society of Antiquaries of London is a learned society "charged by its Royal Charter of 1751 with 'the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries'." It is based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London , and is...

, FBA (born 23 August 1916) is a former British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 historian and archaeologist who studied the Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

.

Biography

Sheppard "Sam" Frere was a classics master and housemaster at Lancing College

Lancing College

Lancing College is a co-educational English independent school in the British public school tradition, founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard. Woodard's aim was to provide education "based on sound principle and sound knowledge, firmly grounded in the Christian faith." Lancing was the first of a...

 c.1949-52 when he was in charge of the excavations at Canterbury during his summer vacations. He made a number of broadcasts about his work at that time. He left Lancing in 1954 to become a university lecturer in archaeology. His family details and dates are given under the family of 'Frere' in Burke's Landed Gentry for 1969. For three seasons early in the 1970s, he was in charge of the archaeological summer school that excavated the Roman fort at Strageath

Strageath

Strageath is a Roman camp near the River Earn in eastern Scotland. Strageath was one of a chain of camps that the Romans used in their march northward. Other notable camps in this chain are Ardoch, Battledykes, Stracathro, Raedykes and Normandykes....

, near Crieff

Crieff

Crieff is a market town in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. It lies on the A85 road between Perth and Crianlarich and also lies on the A822 between Greenloaning and Aberfeldy. The A822 joins onto the A823 which leads to Dunfermline....

, in Perthshire.

Between 1955 and 1961 he excavated at Verulamium

Verulamium

Verulamium was an ancient town in Roman Britain. It was sited in the southwest of the modern city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, Great Britain. A large portion of the Roman city remains unexcavated, being now park and agricultural land, though much has been built upon...

. He then became Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces at the University of London

University of London

-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

 from 1961 to 1966 before becoming Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford University. He is cousin to paleontologist Mary Leakey

Mary Leakey

Mary Leakey was a British archaeologist and anthropologist, who discovered the first skull of a fossil ape on Rusinga Island and also a noted robust Australopithecine called Zinjanthropus at Olduvai. For much of her career she worked together with her husband, Louis Leakey, in Olduvai Gorge,...

. He is now retired.

Publications (selected)

• Problems of the Iron Age in Southern Britain; papers given at a C.B.A. conference held at the Institute of Archaeology, 12 to 14 December 1958. Edited by S. S. Frere. [London, University of London, Institute of Archaeology, 1961].
• Britannia: a history of Roman Britain, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967. Or, London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1967.
• Verulamium Excavations, London, Society of Antiquaries of London; (Distributed by Thames and Hudson), 1972-<1983 >. ISBN 085431007X (v. 1)
• Britannia: a history of Roman Britain. London: Cardinal, 1974. ISBN 0351163107
• Britannia: a history of Roman Britain; revised edition. London ; Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. ISBN 0710089163
• Roman Britain from the Air (with J. K. S. St Joseph). Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0521250889
• Britannia: a history of Roman Britain; 3rd ed., extensively rev. London; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. ISBN 0710212151
• Trajan’s Column: a new edition of the Cichorius plates; introduction, commentary, and notes by Frank Lepper and Sheppard Frere. Gloucester, UK ; Wolfboro, New Hampshire, US: Alan Sutton, 1988. ISBN 0862994675
• Strageath: excavations within the Roman fort, 1973-86; by S. S. Frere and J. J. Wilkes; with contributions by Anne Anderson ... [et al.]. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1989. ISBN 0907764118

Festschriften

• Rome and her Northern Provinces: papers presented to Sheppard Frere in honour of his retirement from the Chair of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire, University of Oxford, 1983; edited by Brian Hartley and John Wacher. Gloucester [Gloucestershire]: A. Sutton, 1983. (Includes "A bibliography of the published works of Sheppard Frere": p. 4-12.) ISBN 0862990467
• Romanitas: essays on Roman archaeology in honour of Sheppard Frere on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday; edited by R. J. A. Wilson. Oxford: Oxbow, 2006. ISBN 1842172484 ; ISBN 9781842172483