This chapter explores what visitors would have seen at the sanctuary and how its setting and built environment would have shaped their experiences at the site more broadly. It begins with an archaeologically grounded reconstruction of the sanctuary and its monuments. It then uses this reconstruction to discuss Aquae Sulis’s dual role as a classicizing, monumentalized, space, and a space outside the normal bounds of lived existence, with aspects of a pilgrimage destination.

This chapter turns to our evidence for ritual practice at the site, in particular activity centred on the three hot springs. Rather than being curative in nature, the water is understood as primarily a medium for enabling ritual relinquishment of objects lost through theft or decay. The chthonic importance of the water is emphasized and linked to other aspects of ritual at the site, in particular reports from the ancient author Solinus that coal was burned on Sulis’s altars. Depositional practice at Aquae Sulis is compared to other watery sites in Britain and Gaul, and the Bath corpus of ‘curse tablets’ is placed into a wider context, with the sanctuary at Uley serving as a particularly important counterpoint to Bath.

This chapter examines the position of Sulis Minerva and her sanctuary within the wider networks of empire and how Roman imperialism was negotiated in different ways throughout the site’s history. It starts by arguing that the foundation of the sanctuary in the Flavian period should be read primarily as an imperialist act designed to proclaim ownership of an indigenous sacred site; this is supported by the iconography datable to this period, especially the pediment of the temple. While this emphasis on imperial domination faded in later periods, Aquae Sulis continued to be a place where individuals, especially soldiers, used the worship of Sulis, and in particular epigraphy linking the deity to the imperial cult, to structure their identity and relationship to the emperor specifically and broader conceptions of empire more generally. The possibility that some of the votives from the sacred spring reflect similar concerns is also explored. Comparative material from other sites in Britain and Gaul is woven into the discussion throughout, and used to argue for a broad understanding of the pervasiveness of emperor-worship and the imperial cult in provincial religion.

This final chapter draws together the themes from the previous chapters to discuss the place of Roman Aquae Sulis as a whole. It then examines the archaeological evidence for the sanctuary’s decay and eventual abandonment in the context of our broader understanding of late- and sub-Roman Britain, and finishes by looking at the Old English poem ‘The Ruin’, thus bringing the story full-circle back to the Middle Ages and the rise of Bath as a healing spa.

This chapter builds on Chapter 1’s exploration of the ways in which the Roman past became linked to the identity of the Georgian and Victorian present, by focusing in particular on the development of a healing sanctuary narrative. It is argued that the concept of Aquae Sulis as a healing sanctuary results from the modern and pre-modern nature of the spa at Bath, rather than from the archaeological evidence for the Roman period.

This chapter presents the landscape of ancient Trimithis, a polis in the fourth century AD, and a synthesis of its urban layout. The settlement extends over an irregular area in which moving sand dunes determined living spaces and the availability of water. Archaeological evidence attests the presence of a settlement at least from the Old Kingdom below the central hill on which the temple of Thoth stood from the New Kingdom to the Roman period. Our knowledge of the settlement life, history, and layout is still incomplete,but the fourth-century AD phase allows some comparisons with other cities of the Empire. The study of the buildings visible on the surface, of the excavated areas, and of the street layout suggests an imperial regular pattern of streets, with impressive public buildings like the thermae. The layout and architecture of Trimithis as they appear today resemble in several aspects the later Islamic medieval settlements of the oasis: vernacular architecture, compact organization of space, high density of buildings, labyrinthine layout, shaded or semi-shaded streets and alleys, sometimes closed with doors, and a certain disposition to close spaces to avoid exposure to sun and winds.

The comparison of two small oases of the Kharga and Dakhla depressions, in the Western Desert of Egypt, confirmed that spring-fed oases have been attractive after the onset of aridity, ca 4500 BC, but irrigated agriculture has not been proved yet before the Intermediate Period. Irrigated areas were suject to harsh constraints despite the wealth of underground water during millennia: wind-induced dune shifting and soil erosion in Amheida and El-Deir, while flash floods destroyed most of the El-Deir oasis during the Roman period. Recovery was more difficult because artesian springs, which relied on water stored during the wet phase of the Holocene, were progressively exhausted by irrigation practices and could no longer compensate for the drying up of the oasis environment. If natural factors are not the unique causes of economic decay in the oases, they may have some responsibility in the progressive abandonment of agriculture during the third and fourth centuries. Amheida disappeared to the benefit of El-Kasr fortress, while El-Deir retained some importance for caravan trade between Hibis and the Nile Valley thanks to a well secured by a newly built fortress from 288 to the sixth century AD.