Documenting a phenomenon that has previously been overlooked, this article examines the later stages of object biography in relation to Romano-British bracelets, namely, their modification and subsequent re-use as smaller rings. Re-use is shown to occur widely and is particularly associated with the late fourth to early fifth centuries a.d., with cut-down bracelets also found in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. The making of smaller rings from late Roman bracelets is demonstrated to be part of a wider phenomenon of re-use, repair and recycling at the end of the Roman period in Britain, with attendant implications of cultural and economic change. It is proposed that the transformation of these artefacts was accompanied by changes in meaning which undermine the apparent continuity that is seen in the extended lifespan of the original object. This in turn illuminates the way that wider cultural norms were gradually eroded in the fifth century. Through the study of these artefacts a new perspective is provided on the transition to post-Roman Britain and the relationship between this and the early Anglo-Saxon period.

In Britannia iii I was able to give a very summary and outline picture of Roman coinfinds in Britain. A year later this picture was extended to France and Italy, and various similarities and differences were noted. At the same time John Casey was working particularly on military coin-finds, and he came independently to very similar conclusions. A framework had been established: there was a British pattern which was different from the continental pattern and all British sites, to a greater or lesser extent, lay within this pattern. The most obvious features, drawn out in diagram form in Britannia iii, included low coin-loss on every site from the Claudian conquest to A.D. 260, high coin-loss from 260 to 294, a dip from 294 to 330, a major peak from 330 to 348, and a general high level of coin-loss in the fourth century.

It is now twenty years since Professor Stuart Piggott published his classic paper on ‘Three Metalwork Hoards of the Roman Period from Southern Scotland’, in which he re-examined the ironwork hoards from Blackburn Mill, Berwickshire, Carlingwark Loch, Kirkcudbrightshire, and Eckford, Roxburghshire. Since then no fewer than four new hoards of ironwork have been found in Scotland or the north of England, and five in southern England: a series of discoveries which amply justifies a reappraisal of their significance. Their importance in the study of Romano-British ironwork can scarcely be exaggerated, for they provide a width of types and a series of associations which does not occur in the material from excavations. Many of the pieces are unique, or are the only complete examples of their type surviving, and together they form the largest group of dated ironwork from Roman Britain, indeed probably in British archaeology. Yet, with the partial exception of Professor Piggott's paper, they have never been considered as a group, and many even among the older discoveries remain unpublished.

Before discussing the evidence for the origines of the men recruited into Roman army units in Britain, and the evidence for Britons being recruited into units in Britain or elsewhere, it will be convenient to summarize the evidence for recruitment-patterns for legions and auxilia for the empire as a whole. It will then be possible to see if the evidence suggests a significantly different situation from that in other provinces, or alternatively if there are similarities which justify the equation of the situation in Britain with that obtaining elsewhere.

The famous Vindolanda tablets are still the largest collection of Roman manuscripts written in ink on wooden leaves instead of papyrus. They were also the first to be discovered; but coincidentally in 1973, when Robin Birley found the first Vindolanda tablet, the late Dorothy Charlesworth began to excavate the southern limits of the Roman fort at Carlisle, in Annetwell Street. Here she was succeeded in 1981 by Ian Caruana, whose own excavations first (1981–4) on the site of the new extension to Tullie House Museum (Trench A), and then (1990) on the site of the BBC Radio Cumbria building (Trench H), discovered ink-written tablets contemporary with those from Vindolanda. Fragmented though they are, they complement the Vindolanda tablets: Carlisle in c.a.d. 100 was the most important Roman base in North-West Britain. In quantity its ink tablets come second — a poor second – to Vindolanda; but only to Vindolanda, it may be added. They have a quality of their own, in particular some unique evidence (1 and 16) of the consumption of barley, wheat, and weapons by a cavalry regiment, and a tantalizing fragment (44) which names the probable regiment, the ala Gallorum Sebosiana, and alludes to the province's best-known governor, Gnaeus Iulius Agricola. The whole collection is published here with commentary; and for citation I suggest Tabulae Luguvalienses, abbreviated to Tab. Luguval.

Some years ago, with the encouragement of Dr D. B. Harden, I began the pursuit of a type of segmented bead apparently rare in Romano-British contexts, but curiously frequent in the graves of Meroitic Faras. A preliminary note appeared in 1966; now, there is much to add, including (by the generosity of Dr Maria Dekówna and Mme Hanna Pawłowska of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences) analyses which in two cases hint at a common origin. But Faras and Britain are only the extremities of a distribution which proved, even when the Far East was excluded, to cover an immense area and a wide range of time. A particularly interesting thread is traceable for Roman times, suggestive of a link with the Mediterranean via eastern rather than western Europe.

Over the past decade most historians and archaeologists have come to accept that the landscape of Roman Britain was an extensively farmed and settled one. Fieldwork has consistently revealed evidence of Romano-British settlement in areas of heavy soils once thought to have been first extensively cleared and colonized only in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods. This is particularly true of the areas of southern and eastern England which have an ‘Ancient Countryside’. In the medieval period these lacked a strong tradition of open-field agriculture and had a settlement pattern which included large numbers of hamlets and isolated farmsteads. Both these features have often been directly related to the chronology of settlement in these areas, on the assumption that early and pre-Saxon settlement was limited to restricted areas of more favourable soils. The dispersed pattern of settlement and the complex pattern of small open-fields and irregular hedged closes are normally interpreted as the result, therefore, of a gradual expansion of settlement in the later Saxon and medieval periods at the expense of formerly uncleared woodland and waste. Compared with the Midland counties, where settlement was more strongly nucleated in the medieval period, such areas were relatively well-wooded at the time of Domesday and often still carry extensive areas of Ancient Woodland. In such areas place-names indicative of Saxon woodland clearance, especially those containing the O.E. element leak (modernley, leigh etc: usually in place names translated ‘a clearing in a wood’) are common, and this has been used to support the conventional model. Various aspects of the appearance of such landscapes, for example the irregular pattern of fields and woods, are also often thought to reflect their origin in late and piecemeal colonization.

Coal has been widely reported from excavations of the Roman period. Although there are few contemporary accounts of its use by the Romans, it is obvious from the contexts of the finds that it was used for a variety of purposes having been recovered in association with, for example, metal-working activities, hypocausts, and a cremation pyre. Archaeologists have been interested in the economic aspects of coal as a fuel and in particular the provenance of the coals in order to reveal the existence of trade routes and the distances involved in its transport.

The text published here was found in 1994 during excavation at 1 Poultry in the City of London (TQ 3258 8110), on the north side of the main east–west road of Roman London just west of the Walbrook stream, in a layer of debris which post-dated the destruction of a roadside building in a late Flavian fire. It is only the second stilus-tablet ‘page’ from London to have been read almost in full. It is a formal and formulaic text but, to a modern reader, its legal language makes this human document still more disquieting.

In this article we offer editions of two texts which were discovered at Vindolanda in the excavation seasons of 1986 and 1988, respectively. Both the letters are complete and are of exceptional interest from the linguistic point of view, as well as for the information which they yield on a variety of points of military, social and economic history.

This article is in part a response to a plea recently presented in this journal that the long-neglected druids be more fully acknowledged in our narratives of the Later Iron Age. It is also an attempt to give voice to an important, but frequently marginalized, example of discrepant indigenous experience in Rome's Western provinces.

In his discussion of the function of the druids in Later Iron Age Gaul and Britain, Creighton has argued that the influence of this social group was in decline by the mid-first century B.C. The druids' fortunes waned, he suggests, because their traditional role as mediators between the human and divine worlds came into conflict with emergent new power structures in the first century B.C.

What are the cultural grounds on which both natives and liberal Europeans lived and understood each other? How much could they grant each other? How, within the circle of imperial domination, could they deal with each other before radical change occurred?

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), 241

As recently remarked by Poulton and Scott, archaeological perspectives on Celtic deity are largely derived from the Romano-Celtic period, with studies employing ‘the evidence of epigraphy and iconography to reveal how particular Roman and Celtic gods were identified with each other’. This paper explores a specific form of post-Conquest epigraphy: name-pairing interpretatio.

In the Journal of Roman Studies, vol. iii, 1913, 73 ff., and vol. xxii, 1932, 99 ff., the late James Curle published two papers on ‘Roman and Native Remains in Caledonia’ and ‘Roman Drift in Caledonia’, in which he discussed with his usual acuteness the significance of Roman objects found on non-Roman sites in Scotland. The second paper, ‘Roman Drift in Caledonia’, was offered as a tribute to Sir George Macdonald, and it was in appreciation of the outstanding achievements of these two scholars that the present paper was submitted to the new journal Britannia.

Between the usurpation of Constantine III and the death of Aetius there are a handful of dateable events associated with the British Isles. Of these the best recorded are the two visits of Germanus to Britain in 429 and c 435. The narrative account of these visits, however, is contained in Constantius's Vita Germani, a work in which literary and theological concerns may well triumph over factual accuracy. Speculation about sub-Roman Britain on the basis of Constantius's account is a fascinating, but dangerous, pastime. If we wish to stay on relatively firm ground, we must consider the voyages of Germanus, as well as subsequent contacts between Britain and the continent, in the context of events south of the Channel.

Mosaics represent one of the best known art forms in the Roman world. Their geometric patterns and designs, their figurative images, and their development through time have been extensively studied, and corpora have been assembled for certain provinces of the Empire. In Britain, the study of the surviving mosaics has led to the identification of certain late Roman ‘schools’ (stylistic groupings) of mosaics on the basis of shared stylistic attributes. Now it will be possible to place this work in a fuller context as the long-awaited corpus of all Roman mosaics known from Britain begins to appear. However, whereas the late mosaics undoubtedly show considerable regional distinctness, the position of the earliest work that pioneered the form in Britain is far less clear, perhaps because mosaics of the first and early second century A.D. are fewer and have excited much less interest.

The Roman military site at Longthorpe, west of Peterborough, was discovered by observation from the air in 1961: no traces now remain on the surface. Excavations between 1967 and 1973 have shown that a 27-acre fortress with timber buildings, accommodating a legionary vexillation together with auxiliary troops, was succeeded by an 11-acre fort. The period of occupation extended from c. 44/8 to c. 62. Crop marks observed from the air at Orton Stanch, 400 m. south-east of the fortress, have led to the discovery of a native farmstead. Excavations there by Messrs. A. Challands, G. B. Dannell and Dr. J. P. Wild have shown that agricultural activities were intermitted for the period of the occupation of the fortress, the settlement being replaced by a large industrial establishment or worksdepot involved in pottery manufacture and possibly in bronze-working with clear military connections. The present report describes the excavation of the fortress: the industrial site is to be published in a future volume of Britannia.

One of the major sources of evidence for the military history of the Roman Empire, particularly for those provinces for which the literary record is defective, is the shifting pattern of forts and fortresses, established and abandoned in response to changing military situations, to advance and retreat and to consolidation and the establishment of frontier control. In order to have any hope of understanding the role of individual forts or groups of sites it is necessary to know not only the detail of their internal layout but also the nature of the troops who occupied them. Several studies have been devoted to the problem of the elucidation of fort garrisons, notably those of Richmond in 1955, Breeze and Dobson in 1974 and, most recently, that of Hassall in 1983. However, these studies have all concentrated on sites of the Flavian period and later and have been concerned almost exclusively with the accommodation of auxiliaries, attempting to identify the forts occupied by the various types of unit which had emerged by that period, alae, quingenary and military, and cohorts, quingenary and milliary, peditate and equitate, each with its individual requirements in terms of numbers, size and arrangement of barracks, stables and stores.

In 1968 a fine and extensive group of Roman surgical and medical instruments (PL. XI) was purchased by the British Museum from a London antiquity dealer. With one or perhaps two exceptions (Nos. 39, 33 below) there is little doubt that they comprise a surgeon's instrumentarium which includes many normal types but also some very rare objects: the three catheters are the largest set of such instruments to be found; the speculum is only the third complete provenanced example of its type, while the bone chisels and sharp spoon have few known parallels; the double blunt hook is one of the finest examples of this rare class of object; the handled needles significantly increase the number of such specialist instruments; the small tanged cautery is one of the very few survivors of a type of instrument that was extremely common in Roman surgery: and the segmented form of one of the medicine boxes is as yet unparallelled.

In 1966 the owner of a small earthwork enclosure, referred to in this paper as Walesland Rath, notified the Ministry of Public Building and Works of his intention to remove the bank and ditch and to bulldoze the interior of the site. The earthwork occupied one corner of a much larger field, and on account of the difficulties involved in cultivating the area in a proper fashion had become overgrown with trees, gorse and bracken. The Ministry concluded that excavation was preferable to preservation in this case, and the author was requested to undertake the work. Previous excavation of the numerous earthworks in Pembrokeshire had been carried out in a desultory fashion by earlier antiquaries, or in more recent years with limited resources. It was therefore decided to take the opportunity of totally excavating the interior of this small enclosure, which in terms of situation and size is typical of many such earthworks in the county, in order to obtain evidence for its date and history and to establish the complete ground plan of the settlement. Such an operation is only rarely undertaken in British archaeology and it was hoped that the results would provide a datum to which other work in the area could be related.