Many units of the Roman army stamped the tiles which were manufactured in military tileries, and these tile-stamps can be useful in assigning structures to the units concerned; and ultimately they can also be employed as an aid to dating once the die-sequences have been established, or directly from imperial titles incorporated in the stamps. But it must be remembered that tiles were frequently re-used and can often therefore only indicate a terminus post quern.

The late Roman defences which are found in many of the chief cities of France have long been remarkable for similarities of design. In the northern and western parts of France many of the cities were protected by thick, high walls, built in rubble concrete with a facing of ‘petit appareil’, interspersed with rows of tiles usually in double or triple courses. The foundations were of large unmortared stone blocks, which were, as often as not, re-used from earlier buildings destroyed in the barbarian raids of the later third century or else deliberately demolished to provide a solid foundation for the new walls. The whole circuit was strengthened by the addition of external towers, usually of one build with the walls. Fortifications of this type are also found in other provinces of the western empire.

Dio provides the only surviving coherent account of the Roman invasion of Britain. Modern attempts to investigate the sources of his History have raised doubts about the reliability of certain details: in the chapters which concern us the description of the river-battle as lasting into a second day and even the division of the army into three parts before sailing have been held to be mere literary topoi. But these suggestions are by no means certain, for each passage is well suited to its context. With one emendation of the text, noted below, we see no certain justification in rejecting any part of Dio's account of the campaign. However, even if the passages concerned could be established as topoi, their rejection would make virtually no difference to an understanding of the campaign, for, as we shall show, the three divisions are irrelevant to the development of the advance while the reduction of the battle-span from one and a half days to one does not detract from the difficulties of the river crossing or from the decisiveness of victory.

The silver coins of Cunobelin have received relatively little attention in comparison to Cunobelin's gold and bronze coinage, although the artistic merit of the issues based on classical prototypes has been much commented upon. The lack of detailed examination of other aspects of the silver coinage has undoubtedly been due largely to its rarity. When Allen published ‘Cunobelin's gold’ in Britannia in 1975, some sixty-six silver coins were known, of nineteen types; only one type was known by more than six or seven examples. In contrast, the appendix to this paper lists approximately 335 coins, of twenty-eight types, from one hundred different locations. Most of this fivefold increase in finds is due to metal detecting, with less than five per cent of the total found in the course of archaeological excavation.

The article reviews the principal surviving examples of inscriptions on mosaic pavements and wall-paintings in Roman Britain. For some of these it makes tentative suggestions towards new readings or seeks to adjudicate between the conflicting readings of earlier commentators. The eleven inscriptions examined belong to different classes: signatures, dedications, good luck messages, labels, and literary or pseudo-literary glosses upon figure-scenes. The existence of the inscriptions implies that viewers were expected to be literate, or at least that being literate, if not actually well-educated, was socially important.

Childhood palaeopathology remains an underutilised resource in the study of Roman Britain, particularly for exploring the lives of the rural population. Lesions in child skeletons provide unique insights into past lifeways and population health, as adverse environmental conditions translate more readily into the osteological record of these vulnerable members of society. To demonstrate the range of information gleaned from the children, 1,279 non-adults (0–17 years) from 26 first- to fifth-century urban and rural settlements were analysed, comparing morbidity and mortality in the most comprehensive study to date. The distribution of ages-at-death suggests migration between country and town, the latter presenting a stressful and unsanitary environment. However, as demonstrated by high rates of metabolic disease and infections, life in the countryside was hampered by demanding physical labour and potentially oppressive conditions with restricted access to resources.

Official Roman action in the aftermath of the Boudican revolt is shown in this article to reveal a strong, persistent intention to allay local anger. Under consideration are such aspects as the Roman policy of official appointments in the region, the deployment of military forces, and the commemoration of the victory over the rebel forces. The conclusion reached takes issue with the widely prevailing view that Roman governance based itself mostly on oppressive measures.

This article contains full editions with commentaries of the first instalment of the approximately 37 ink writing-tablets from Vindolanda discovered in the excavation seasons of 2001, 2002 and 2003. The editions are numbered continuously from 854, following the sequence in A.K. Bowman and J.D. Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses III) (2003), and are grouped in the following categories: Literary Texts, Military Documents, Accounts, Letters. The second instalment, to be published in 2011, will contain the remaining Letters and Descripta.

There is growing awareness of the significance of coastal trade around Roman Britain, though very few of the smaller ports and towns that were engaged in such activity have seen archaeological investigation. This paper reports on work at Crandon Bridge, in Somerset – including excavations in advance of the construction of the M5 motorway – that appears to have acted as a trans-shipment port where goods brought by road and river through Somerset were loaded onto larger vessels that could cross the Bristol Channel. Analysis of the buildings and artefacts suggests that this extensive site may also have been a small town.

This paper describes how the reinterpretation of published coin evidence from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, coupled with favourable conditions for cropmark formation, led to the discovery in 2013 of a probable Claudio-Neronian fort in the upper Usk valley near Brecon. This extends our knowledge of pre-Flavian installations further into central Wales than the hitherto most westerly known fort at Abergavenny.

Roman Britain in late antiquity is an area of special interest to the archaeologist, because life was flourishing peacefully there at a time when we hear about disorder and destruction afflicting the nearby provinces on the continent. Nevertheless — and this perhaps increases the interest we know very little about cultural life, about the state of education and knowledge in the British provinces at this time. The Channel, which protected Britain from the majority of the invaders, might seem to have had its effect also on the cultural influx from Gaul. The literary sources, which very seldom mention Britain after the Severi, provide scarcely any useful information. There is virtually no one prominent in literary or even political life known to have come from Britain. Nor do we know anything about the cultural effect of the court of the British usurpers or of the presence of Constantius Chlorus and his son Constantine.

Excavation took place at Burgh Castle between 1958 and 1961 to examine areas inside the Roman fort thought to have been damaged by the plough. Since the death of Charles Green, who directed this work, responsibility for the preparation of a final report has been assumed by the present writer, and the task of examining the finds from the excavation is well under way.

In a recent attempt to clarify the basis on which commercial and domestic buildings in Roman provincial towns were laid out, it was suggested that two different units of measurement had been employed in the planning of the Insula xiv timber buildings at Verulamium. It appeared that in Periods I, IIA and IIB the block had been planned in terms of the pes Drusianus, but that in Period IIC, c. A.D. 130, the pes Monetalis had been adopted and remained in use throughout subsequent periods.

Professor Branigan, in his recent article ‘Villa Settlement in the West Country’, interprets the plans of six British villas as a series of rooms ranged around a small courtyard which he calls an intra-mural yard. They will be discussed later; for the moment it is enough to point out that no evidence is adduced in support of the interpretation. Branigan, however, not content to leave the matter there, goes on to say that the intra-mural yard is ‘a design which is common among the smaller villas in northern Gaul’ and points to six plans in support of this notion. Again, no evidence is offered. Now what is so astonishing is that three of the villas cited as evidence for this bland statement were interpreted as hall-type villas in 1921 by Franz Oelmann in the classic article which established the existence of the type, and have been so regarded ever since. The reversion to the orthodoxy of nearly sixty years ago is not defended, Oelmann's arguments are not refuted, nor does his article even appear in the bibliography; we are expected to take Branigan's word that it is so. For all that there are no arguments to attack, the point at issue is of such fundamental importance for villa studies in all the northern provinces that I propose to pass in review the essential facts on which judgement has to be based.