Recent excavations on the A14 Cambridge-to-Huntingdon Road Improvement Scheme have revealed that pottery-making was an important aspect of the economies of early Roman rural communities living in the densely settled landscape of southern Cambridgeshire, UK. This paper discusses the seven known ‘Lower Ouse Valley’ pottery-making sites as reflective of local rural economy and social interaction, highlighting the different scales at which there is evidence for social networks being in play in the constitution of this newly discovered pottery industry. It is argued that the density of rural settlement in this area helped facilitate the emergence of a coherent but informally defined ceramic tradition, embodied as a system of technical knowledge shared predominantly between neighbours and as features of non-specialised social interactions.

The proliferation of fortification in north-western Europe during Late Antiquity marks an important shift from the first to early third centuries. The fortified cities and military installations were joined by new fortified towns and rural and hilltop defences. While these defences have been extensively studied, there has been little engagement with this transformation at a statistical level. This article provides an overview of defence in the region using data collected across northeastern Gaul and the provinces of Germania Secunda and Germania Prima. It will highlight biases, distributions and key variations in the dataset and demonstrate regional variations in defence on a large scale.

As the leading journal for studies of Roman Britain for over 50 years, Britannia has proved a successful publishing outlet for papers that have arisen from the UK developer-funded archaeology sector. This level of interest should encourage the sector to submit more papers to Britannia, but it could also encourage influential journals to improve inclusivity in the publishing traditions of the sector, which are discussed in terms of a widespread failure to acknowledge intellectual property and expertise and to encourage wider involvement in analysis and publishing. The authors use three case studies from their own areas of work to illustrate current problems surrounding authorship, leadership and gendered practice. We then propose ways in which these issues could be tackled.

Intramural adult human remains, whether articulated or disarticulated, from Roman towns in Britain are uncommon. There is evidence for some remains to have been deliberately curated and/or treated post mortem in a particular way before final deposition. This paper focuses on the disarticulated human remains from late Iron Age and Roman Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum), noting the parts of the skeleton represented, their contexts, and whether there is evidence for curation or treatment post mortem. Twenty-one examples have been radiocarbon dated, enabling an assessment of changes in spatial patterning over time. An early and a late cluster are identified. The results from Silchester follow a review of comparable evidence from the major towns of Roman Britain. This reveals a broad similarity in patterning between Silchester and the Romano-British countryside. There are several urban parallels for Silchester’s late cluster, but only London for the early grouping.

Satellite imagery in north-west Wirral shows a cropmark, plausibly representing the partial circuit of a Roman camp. On Wirral — that peninsula flanked by the rivers Mersey and Dee — the northern coast of which provided the only seaboard of the Cornovii tribe, Roman military sites are unknown. However, a fort has been posited 7 km to the north-north-west at Meols and a camp in its hinterland would not be unreasonable. This feature is therefore potentially significant and warrants description.

A small group of late Roman ‘spoon-shaped’ objects with weapon terminals and a westerly distribution add to the growing evidence of ‘regionality’ in material culture within Roman Britain. While their function remains uncertain, the presence of weapon-shaped terminals can be seen alongside the increasing numbers of model objects recorded from the province.