The Roman fort of Carlisle was first discovered by the late Dorothy Charlesworth in 1973 at Annetwell Street. Excavation by her and after 1980 by the Carlisle Archaeological Unit located the southern defences of the primary fort and identified a sequence of Roman forts extending from AD. 72/3 down to the fourth century. In 1981–2 excavation at Castle Street produced a sequence of timber phases closely matching the fort stratigraphy, with military association in the finds assemblages, but lying outside the fort defences. The early phases were arguably part of a defended annexe or within a military vicus, though proof was lacking.

The remains of the Roman fort, known as Stutfall Castle, hang, in picturesque isolation, on a sloping hillside of Wealden clay, dominated to the north by the castle and church of Lympne which occupy the edge of the ragstone plateau above: to the south lies the vast expanse of Romney marsh. In its present position the fort straddles the 100 ft. contour but as we will see (p. 234 ff.) the clay slope has slumped to such an extent in the past, moving the fort with it, that its present elevation and immediate environment bear little resemblance to its original situation.

Littleborough lies on the west bank of the river Trent between Newark and Gainsborough, at the point where the Roman road from Lincoln to Doncaster crossed the river. Finds of Roman material from the site are recorded from the sixteenth century onwards and Roman tile occurs built into the small Norman church. Epigraphic and literary evidence combine to identify the site with Segelocvm, the place name apparently referring to a pool with rapid current in the river. The present paper brings together a considerable amount of new evidence from aerial photographs by J.K. St Joseph and D.N. Riley and the results of excavations by W.B. Clark in 1954–56 and by J.S. Wade in 1968–70. The combined data suggest a substantial defended settlement lying to the north of the present road from Sturton-le-Steeple to the river bank.

Samian ware being widely present, of striking quality, and highly useful to the archaeologist has a special position within Roman studies. This article brings a large body of samian ware data together to explore the nature of its incidence at settlements and in graves. The examination shows how the nature of samian ware distribution is highly structured between different types of site and between different consumers. This is shown to be so in the case of both Britain and the other Western provinces. The findings raise issues around the use of samian ware in society and point the way to harnessing the rich potential of samian as a source of information as understanding of its utility for the archaeologist expands.

Bone pins are often regarded as undatable. Though several classifications of head-types have been produced, notably that from the Jewry Wall site at Leicester (Kenyon 1948: 264), no attempt has been made to relate any type to a particular date-range and to test such dating against comparable published material.

The rectangular earthwork on Tregear Farm, Nanstallon, just west of Bodmin has long been suspected to be of Roman origin. When the eastern rampart was levelled in the early nineteenth century and those on the other three sides were cut back and reduced to typical high Cornish hedge banks, coins of Vespasian and some first-century pottery were found, including pieces of a samian form 29 and a stamped mortarium. The finds were deposited in the Bodmin Museum, where they were seen by Haverfield when he was preparing his account of Romano-British Cornwall for the Victoria County History. He tentatively suggested that the earthwork was a fort, or possibly ‘a protection for immigrant traders’, shrewdly observing that its occupation was of brief duration. Hencken in 1932 referred to it only as ‘a little frontier settlement’ and the Ordnance Survey Roman Britain map of 1956 also marked it simply as a settlement site. The generally accepted opinion was that the Roman campaigns and military occupation did not extend beyond the Fosse Way or, at most, the river Exe.

The tradition of amphora manufacture within Egypt is a long one, covering the period from Pharaonic times through to the Arab period and even continuing into the modern era. Throughout this time clays from the Nile and Delta regions were especially exploited to produce amphorae. Thus many of these large transport vessels from different periods share the same distinctive drab chocolate-brown fabric (centring around Munsell 10YR 4/4), enlivened by occasional plates of golden mica, small pieces of white limestone, and frequent elongate voids which once held organic material burnt out during firing. Interestingly enough, these same clay sources are still in use today.

Professor Rivet once wrote ‘One curious feature of Romano-British studies must be noted. This is the tendency, perhaps due to the intractable nature of the evidence, to create myths.’ It is the purpose of this paper to examine the evidence for one of those myths. It is not intended to investigate its origin or development, instructive though that might be.

The recognition by R. E. M. Wheeler in 1920 that the massive Norman keep at Colchester encapsulated the podium of the Temple of Claudius stimulated Dr P. G. Laver, his collaborator in an earlier study of the colonia, to excavate in and around the keep during the 1920's and 30's. Some of the results were published by the late Rex Hull in Roman Colchester (1958). At the time of Hull's death in 1976, the writer was preparing the drawings to accompany a paper which included a summary report by Hull on the excavations undertaken within and south of the keep by Laver, assisted by E. J. Rudsdale, in 1931–3. Subsequently much additional information about these excavations came to light in Colchester Museum. This raised a number of important questions, which led in 1977 to one of Laver's trenches in the sub-crypt being re-opened and extended, and the cutting of a trench in front of the keep. Mrs B. R. K. Niblett (née Dunnett) also made available the results of her excavations on the west side of the Temple precinct in 1964 and 1969. The evidence from these sources relevant to the history of the site in the Roman period is presented here; and in conjunction with previously published material has been used as the basis of a re-appraisal of its development, summarized in TABLE I. A similar study of the post-Roman history of the site has recently appeared. Much of the discussion is necessarily speculative, being intended primarily to advance hypotheses which may be tested in future excavations and by further analysis of the surviving structures.

Except for the interest aroused by their cemeteries, the extramural territories of the Roman cities of Britain have never aroused sufficient interest for them to have been subjected to systematic exploration. Nevertheless, as a sensitive barometer to chart their changing fortunes, the margins of a city have considerable potential, as Esmonde Cleary's review of the evidence from the cities and towns of Roman Britain amply demonstrated. Much of what we know derives from the results of adventitious rescue excavation carried out in the context of inter- and post-War city and town development, but comparatively little has emerged from greenfield sites like Calleva which have very largely escaped modern interference. Since the final season of the Society of Antiquaries’ excavation of Silchester in 1909 when attention focused on the ditches surrounding the town wall, only limited investigations have been made of the extramural territory of Calleva. Both Cotton and Boon excavated parts of the Outer Earthwork on the western side, but the evaluation of the defensive sequence was their principal objective, rather than an understanding of the extramural terrritory per se. That has had to wait for the systematic study of the aerial photography and material collected by field-walking which has given us a first glimpse of the organization and use of the extramural territory, and which has now been complemented by the publication of all the aerial photography from Silchester. The two types of survey have shown that the main axis of extramural activity is east-west along the roads leading to London and Cirencester/Bath. However, there is almost no aerial photography to illuminate our understanding of the north-south routes to Dorchester-on-Thames and Chichester/Winchester, although surface collection has revealed spreads of material extending over three hundred metres south of the South Gate through to trie fourth century.6 To the north, however, extensive semi-permanent pasture has hindered non-intrusive investigation and only the evidence of major structures such as the road to Dorchester, and elements of lanes and streets, have been evident from the aerial photography.

Woodchester, a small village near Stroud in Gloucestershire, is famous for the Orpheus mosaic which underlies its former church-yard. This mosaic is the largest in Britain and appropriately enough is known as the great pavement. It is however only occasionally uncovered, and, indeed, has been seen on only three occasions since the war, in 1951, 1963 and 1973. In 1973 it was comprehensively studied by Dr David Smith, it was drawn by Mr David Neal, and a full photographic record was made by the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (PL. XIV). In that year it was visited by over 140,000 people during the seven weeks it was open, and plans were mooted, and indeed still are being mooted, to place it on permanent exhibition. So far these have been thwarted by a lack of money and by the fact that the former churchyard has only recently gone out of use.

In a paper in Britannia (v (1974), 303–9) Roger Tomlin addressed himself to the chronology of the barbarica conspiratio against the British diocese and the Roman response to it, which are described by Ammianus Marcellinus (xxvii. 8 and xxviii. 3). The traditional view, based upon Ammianus, is that news of the barbarian attack reached the Emperor Valentinian I no earlier than the end of August 367, while he was on his way from Amiens to Trier. After the speedy despatch and recall, in turn, of the generals Severus and Jovinus, Theodosius, the father of the future Emperor Theodosius I, was sent to Britain, arriving there in the spring of 368. He crushed the invaders in two campaigns in 368 and 369 returning to court at the end of the latter year. Against this view Tomlin argues that news of the attack reached the Imperial court in June 367, that Theodosius crossed to Britain before late September, reached London before the end of the same year, and reconquered and restored the rest of the country by the end of 368.

One of the difficulties facing the archaeologist when trying to use the evidence of ancient writers is to know when that writer (historian or otherwise) is relating fact, and when he is merely involved with ‘topoi’–the stock literary descriptions or situations inseparable from history as rhetoric. This note is concerned with two ‘topoi’ in the Agricola.

AN important though infrequently discussed aspect of Britain's legionary fortresses is the existence, on the analogy of the arrangements made in other provinces, around each of them of a large tract of land which came under the direct control of the resident legion. As a citizen body headed by a deputy or legatus of the emperor a legion could ‘possess’ a territory on behalf of the Roman People and, for administrative and legal purposes, be regarded as a locally sovereign respublica in just the same way as a chartered town or a formally constituted native civitas, as is evidenced by instances where the boundaries of civil territoria run with those of army lands, implying equivalent status. Although lands were also allotted to auxiliary units, overall control of such areas is likely to have rested with the legate of the closest legion, a situation which not only stemmed from the fact that the auxilia were both in theory and in reality auxiliaries to the legions but which also reflected their origin in a period when the legions could be contrasted as wholly citizen bodies with the overwhelmingly peregrine auxilia.

This article continues the series on air reconnaissance in Roman Britain published by Professor J.K. St Joseph in the Journal of Roman Studies between 1951 and 1977. It is at once an affirmation of the undiminished value of this mode of archaeological prospection and an acknowledgement of the notable contribution made by that means to the study of Roman Britain by Professor St Joseph over a period of thirty-five years.

Of the senior Roman officials who took part in the administration of Britain perhaps the most intriguing is Severus' procurator, M. Oclatinius Adventus. His service in the province is recorded for us on two inscriptions erected in the governorship of L. Alfenus Senecio between 205 and 207. The first was found at Chesters on Hadrian's Wall:

In November 1977, a large relief sculpture of Romandate was discovered during drainage work on farmland in the parish of Brant Broughton and Stragglethorpe in Lincolnshire. The sculpture had been unearthed by a mechanical excavator in the process of recutting the sides of a field-boundary dyke. Although it was not possible to examine the sculpture in situ, it had apparently been found lying face downwards in a shallow scoop in the subsoil below a residual east-west plough ridge of the broad ridge-and-furrow cultivation which until recently had covered the field. Apart from a fine follis of Licinius I (A.D. 308–324), the sculpture was not found in association with any other Roman material. Part of a worn and battered Roman altar and heavy concentrations of Romano-British pottery and building stone were later found after ploughing some 200 m to the north-west, and fieldwork has located a series of such concentrations in the surrounding fields. Air photographs of the immediate area show an enclosurecomplex together with a pit-alignment nearby. Two kilometres to the west aerial photography has pin-pointed enclosures of probable Romano-British date in the parish of Beckingham and occasional finds of Roman material have been recorded over the years in Brant Broughton.

The Roman Legionary Museum at Caerleon, since 1930 a branch gallery of the National Museum of Wales, stands within the legionary fortress of Isca above a plot of the still little-explored scamnum tribunorum in the dextral angle of the via principalis and via praetoria (FIG. 1). With confirmation in 1982 of proposals for the complete rebuilding of the museum to an enlarged plan, the National Museum undertook responsibility for the archaeological excavation of the affected area (some 290 m2) which, in part, was scheduled under the Ancient Monuments Acts. In several episodes, between October 1983 and March 1985, all was systematically reduced to the level of the natural ground surface (at a depth of some 2–3 m below the present surface). Pressure of time and funds required that, in the later stages of this work, much of the basal (mainly Flavian) stratigraphy was removed by machine to reveal the fullest possible plan of the primary timber buildings of which so little is yet known at Isca (PLS IV A and B).