In the upsurge of interest in the condition of the cities of Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, and in the causes for their severely reduced circumstances, several facets of the problem are currently undergoing scrutiny in the light of increasing knowledge. One such facet is the part supposedly played by plague and other outbreaks of disease in extinguishing town life in Britain during the fifth century. This has been most fully discussed by Mr J. S. Wacher in the final chapter of his work on Romano-British cities, but the idea is at large, growing, and becoming less and less restrained. In his assessment of the role of epidemic disease in bringing about the collapse of Romano-British urban culture, Wacher argues with some force that it was decisive, comparing its influence with ‘the appalling effects over the whole of Europe of the Black Death in the fourteenth century and of the Great Plague two centuries later’. Many of the literary sources of the fifth and sixth centuries which mention major outbreaks of disease in various parts of the Empire are assembled to compose a picture of which Gildas himself would have approved, a tale of epidemics and progressive weakness which ‘could spell the end of a society which was already disintegrating’. Again, ‘in the disease-ridden world of antiquity, a pestilence which attracted the attention of a contemporary writer would indeed have been serious …In a world where death from disease was commonplace, a reference to a mortalitas rnagna probably meant just that’.

Urban defences in Roman Britain and the dates of their erection have been discussed by various writers during the last three decades, and the subject has received renewed attention in three recent publications. The last of these has put forward views concerning both date and motivation which a wider consideration of the evidence makes hard to accept. In general, however, the outline of events is clear. Although certain cities received earthworks in the first century or masonry defences from early in the second, the great majority remained open until, in the second half of the second century, a very large number of earth-work circuits was erected in what, all are agreed, must be either a concerted programme or a chain reaction. This embraced not only the cities (the civitas capitals) but also a great variety of minor centres. Beginning quite early in the third century, or even at its outset, and continuing for 70 or 80 years, a long series of towns was receiving walls in masonry. Where earth ramparts already existed the front was normally cut back to receive the wall; elsewhere fresh banks were piled behind the new work. Free-standing walls appeared only in the fourth century and are found at very few towns, for most were already defended. Another development of the same period was the addition of external towers to existing walls: most of these towers seem to date from the third quarter of the fourth century, but some were earlier, beginning, perhaps with Verulamium, c. 265–70.

This paper studies rural populations in the Roman frontier province of Germania inferior, employing a perspective that allocates more space to the exploitative and repressive aspects of Roman rule. We draw attention to an alternative series of topics than the ones currently presented in rural archaeology. This includes attention to situations of crisis and instability, to fundamental reordering of rural populations, to issues of migration and to the interconnectivity of rural developments and imperial power structures. While these topics are usually considered as ‘historically given’, they are rarely the subject of serious archaeological research. This attempt at a more historicising approach does not mean a simple return to the traditional paradigm of historische Altertumskunde. Much better equipped than our predecessors of two or three generations ago, we archaeologists of the 21st century are able to engage in a critical and creative dialogue with historical sources and models.

A collection of six fist-and-phallus amulets from excavations at Catterick, North Yorks., is here reconsidered alongside their unique context. The group consists of five amulets from a single infant inhumation and a sixth found separate from the rest. All exhibit features defining them as a clear group of objects; they are all curved with a phallus and a fist making the manus fica joined in the centre by a scallop shell. There are three left-handed and three right-handed fists. The traditional interpretation of fist-and-phallus type amulets relates to military ideas of strength and virility, but in the context provided by this small group it is clear that their apotropaic function should be given additional credence. No other context in Roman Britain directly associates the fist-and-phallus type and infant inhumation.

Hoards of denarii are common in Britain and the number which have been recorded in detail means that it is now possible to suggest reasonably accurately what a ‘normal’ hoard of a particular date should look like. That being the case, we can then look for variation around that norm and both investigate and speculate what that variation means. A methodology is developed which suggests periods of faster and less rapid coin circulation which has implications for consideration of monetisation. The model also enables us to view where denarii entered circulation; unsurprisingly the army looms large in this picture. The methodology is directly transferable to other provinces and other periods where there are long-lived, relatively stable monetary systems.

The spread of Roman material culture in Britain in the decades before and after the Claudian invasion has long been an important field for scholars of Roman Britain. Two traditional concerns have been the supply of the Roman army and the distribution of Roman items to civilian and native populations during this transitional and formative period. These areas have often been studied independently of each other. The examination of the supply and spread of material culture is valuable in its own right, but can contribute to our understanding of broader developments such as the impact on indigenous populations of Roman culture, the nature of the Roman economy, military organization, and Romanization. It is the intention of the current paper to outline and consider the incidence of one class of Roman artefact in a region of Britain and to demonstrate how the comparative study of such material may assist our understanding of social and economic developments in the first century A.D. The artefact type is pottery and the area of study is the eastern side of England from Leicester to Co. Durham. The perspective is chronological and comparative and it draws principally upon quantitative data.

The complex of the public baths at Wroxeter (that part of the site at present open to the public) was entered from a great basilican hall through doors in the Old Work, the standing north wall of the frigidarium of the baths (A on FIG. 1). Earlier excavations, beginning with Thomas Wright's in 1859 and extending at intervals up to the present day, have shown that the basilica was an aisled hall (B) 73 m (240 ft.) long and 20 m (65 ft.) broad with a portico (C) extending the whole length of its northern side. At its east end was an annexe with a small additional room in one corner. At the west end (D) Thomas Wright found evidence of an entrance ‘with a considerable amount of architectural ornamentation’. The south aisle and the nave were paved with tiles arranged in a herring-bone pattern, but the north aisle was divided into compartments with mosaic floors, some of which were removed in the nineteenth century. North of the portico ran a street which bounded the baths insula.

Similarities of plan between town houses and the main houses of villaestates in Roman Britain have been asserted by some, denied by others, but never considered in detail. The purpose of this paper is to put forward four suggestions: (i) that in certain areas the corridor house, winged and unwinged, appeared at the villas as early as, if not earlier than, in the towns; (ii) that in Britain villa planning influenced town-house planning in a manner not generally found on the Continent; (iii) that in construction and decoration villa-dwellings exhibit a far higher degree of Romanisation than their urban counterparts until roughly the mid second century; and that, if right, these hypotheses point to important conclusions for the economic and social development of town and country in the first hundred years of Roman rule.

In the past decade there has been a growing acceptance that aspects of Romano-British religious or ritual life can often be detected in unusual deposits that have no overtly religious content. This has led to a debate about the nature of precious metal hoards. Should they be seen as one aspect of this ‘ritual’ behaviour, or did the motives often come from the need for safe keeping with a variety of patterns being observable? Though those favouring a more ritual interpretation of the hoards have stressed the need to view them alongside other special deposits of non-precious material, there has been little attempt to set individual hoards within the context of the more general material culture in use at the time of their deposition. It will always be difficult to set spectacular finds such as the Hoxne treasure against the background of what is common as a site find, but it is possible to do this for the more modest hoards. This paper is an exploration of one such class of hoard, those with snake jewellery. At one level these can be interpreted as simply safe-keeping hoards of various types. If the jewellery is placed within the wider context of contemporary patterns of personal ornament, however, anomalies are revealed that make such straightforward interpretations difficult to sustain.

THE purpose of this paper is to bring together, describe and assess the significance of the 40 or so miniature items occurring, for the most part, in or near military installations in Roman Britain and other sites in the North. The compilation of this material was undertaken with the aid of a grant from the British Academy in 1977–1978; the work has entailed visits to about 15 museums mainly in the Hadrian's Wall region, whence the bulk of the evidence has come. I have elsewhere discussed the model items occurring in what may loosely be described as the civilian areas of south-east Britain, where I have attempted to demonstrate their essentially ritual significance (I use the term ‘civilian’ purely in a geographical sense). That study covered an area bounded in the north and west by the Fosse Way, but excluded Richborough as an essentially non-civilian installation. The present survey involves the remainder of the British Isles and includes Richborough.

In recent years, enough objects of a religious or votive nature have been found to suggest that there was a temple in one particular area of the Roman settlement of Great Walsingham with Wighton, in north central Norfolk. These include some important figurines, amongst them three quite different Mercury figures, two goats, one of them very well modelled, and three cocks. There is a portrait bust of Minerva and another of a three-horned deity, masks of Cupid, and representations of satyrs. Nearby, in separate contexts, were discovered a figure of Minerva and a mount in the form of a head of Jupiter. The votive material includes three rings with dedicatory inscriptions—to Mercury, and probably to Toutates, and to the Matres Transmarini; there is also a bronze letter ‘V’ used in a dedication, possibly even the first letter of V.S.L.M. There are six model objects—a tiny enamelled stand, two wheels from different moulds, a mattock head, an axe, and a spear; there is also a lead coin-mould, perhaps for making ‘temple money’ and the handle of a trulla. The finds imply polytheistic beliefs. However, the recovery of so many representations of the god Mercury suggests that here, as elsewhere in the Roman North-West, he was the most popular deity; the finds relating to Cupid and satyrs suggest the existence also of a cult to Bacchus.

Damage to part of the earthwork at Dyke Hills, Dorchester on Thames, provided the opportunity to recover the badly disturbed remains of a late Roman burial which had contained an elaborate belt set and an axe. This burial, of a type very unusual in Roman Britain, is argued to be of early fifth-century date and to be directly comparable with well-known burials recovered near by in 1874 which formed a starting point for the ‘soldiers and settlers’ debates of the 1960s and beyond. The Dorchester burials are seen here as those of late Roman military personnel, and their local and wider context is discussed.

The Roman period sees the introduction of many new plants and animals into Britain, with a profound impact on people's experience of their environment. Sweet chestnut is considered to be one such introduction, for which records of sweet chestnut wood and charcoal from archaeological excavations of Romano-British period contexts have been used as evidence. This paper reviews the records for sweet chestnut in Britain pre-a.d. 650, by critically evaluating original excavation reports and examining archived specimens. This review re-assesses the original identifications of sweet chestnut and/or their dating and concludes that most of the evidence that justified sweet chestnut's status as a Roman archaeophyte is untenable. The review emphasises the importance of securely identifying and directly dating plant material and of long-term curation by museums and archives. The Supplementary Material online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X19000011) contains details of all published records of finds of sweet chesnut.

This article contains full editions with commentary of a selection from the ink writing-tablets discovered in the excavation of 2017, four letters written by or to the prefect Iulius Verecundus. The editions are numbered continuously from 890, following the sequence in Tab. Vindol. IV.1 and 2.

The Claudio-Neronian kilns at Greenhouse Farm are one of the few extensively excavated pottery production sites of this period in Cambridgeshire. The analysis presented in this paper attempts to do justice to this fact as well as touching on some broader themes; divided in two parts, the first discusses the site, kilns and pottery production, the second tackles the broader issue of early (i.e. pre-Flavian) pottery production in the region. Apart from the military kilns associated with Longthorpe in Peterborough, the only other comparable site of this date in the county is that at War Ditches, Cherry Hinton, which lies only 3.5 km south of Greenhouse Farm and at which several phases of salvage work were undertaken as the site was gradually quarried away early in the last century. On a smaller scale, recent excavations at Blackhorse Lane, Swavesey have found two kilns of a similar date, while another first-century kiln was found in the 1950s at Water Newton.

The Hadrianic fort at Maryport in Cumbria is well known for the large series of altars found in its vicinity, including twenty dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus (RIB 815–31, 833–35) and one to Jupiter Augustus (RIB 814). Of these, sixteen were dedicated by cohors i Hispanorum equitata and its successive commanders; they are thought to be annual dedications made either on 3 January or on the anniversary of the emperors succession. Four of these altars were dedicated by M. Maenius Agrippa, and four by C. Caballius Priscus, both of whom are recorded as holding the rank of tribune; four other commanders have the rank of prefect, save one who might have been a centurion in temporary command as praepositus. If the dedications are annual, a total of fourteen or fifteen years is involved. As prefects normally commanded cohorts five hundred strong while milliary cohorts were commanded by tribunes, it has often been suggested that cohors i Hispanorum during Hadrian's reign had been doubled in strength for about eight years, only later to be reduced again to its original size. The cohort had been in Britain at least since the Flavian period, when it is recorded at Ardoch (RIB 2213); but its expansion to milliary strength under Hadrian, ifit occurred at all, which in this paper I suggest it did not, would probably have happened c. A.D. 125, because the newly built fort at Maryport at c. 1.9 ha is too large to have been planned for a quingenary unit. The forts of these units normally averaged c. 1.5 ha, whereas Maryport approaches the average for milliary cohorts of c. 2 ha. The reduction of the cohort back to its original strength, it has been argued, would have taken place in the early 130s, when a detachment may have been sent to serve in the Jewish War, which broke out in 132.