An assured water-supply is essential to the survival and functioning of any urban community. Aristotle was, therefore, stating the obvious when he emphasized that a secure water-source was necessary when selecting a site for a new city, for this factor had long since been appreciated by the Greek colonists of Thurii and Cyrene, for example. An assured water-supply, however, may merely depend on the proximity of rivers and springs, and on the digging of wells and the provision of cisterns, as was the case at Rome until the construction of the Aqua Appia of 312 B.C. It was probably the physical growth of cities which led to the establishment of more organized, civic water-supplies. By the classical period the presence of public fountains was taken so much for granted that Pausanias regarded them as one of the requirements without which a settlement could hardly be recognized as a polis–and only the inhabitants of poleis were civilized.

When the fifth edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain was published in March 2001, the distributions of individual classes of site raised questions about the character of Roman Britain. In particular, apparent differences between the response to Rome of the peoples of the South and East and of those of the North and West of Britain were highlighted. These issues are discussed here in the context of the key monument class distributions depicted on the Map.

It has always been apparent that some (probably the majority) of the classicizing coin types of the British kings were taken from Roman republican and imperial issues. The best known example is, perhaps, the reverse of a stater of Tincommius which is thought to be the work of a Roman engraver. It shows a horseman with a javelin and is copied from a denarius of P. Crepusius. For cases of similar borrowings we may cite the head of Jupiter Ammon on bronze coins of Cunobelin, which appears on certain late republican denarii and aurei; the standing figure of Hercules on a silver coin issued by the same king, which was taken from a denarius of C. Vibius Varus; and a running lion on the reverse of a silver coin struck by Verica, that was almost certainly adapted from the reverse of a denarius issued in Gaul by Augustus for Legio XVI. This by no means exhausts the list, which also includes Neptune standing with his trident on another silver coin of Verica; the butting bull on issues of Tasciovanus, Cunobelin and Eppillus; the capricorn on a coin of Eppillus; Victory sacrificing a bull on an issue of Cunobelin; and virtually all the classicizing portraits on the obverses of the British dynastic coins.

A large number of hoards of silver coins are known from late fourth-century Britain, and every year still more come to light. These hoards usually contain more or less the same sorts of coin and it may be helpful to give a summary of the main issues, as they are not presented very clearly in the standard reference book for the period, RIC IX.

Two damaged, weathered marble portraits, both discovered in the 1780s at opposite ends of Roman Britain, one at Bosham in West Sussex, the other at Hawkshaw in Peeblesshire, are here re-examined and identified as portraits of the emperor Trajan. The Bosham head is interpreted as a post-mortem image of the deified Trajan set up at the margins of Chichester Harbour, probably during the visit to Britain by the emperor Hadrian in the early a.d. 120s. The Hawkshaw portrait of Trajan appears to have been refashioned from a likeness of Domitian and may originally have been part of a monument created to celebrate and commemorate the total conquest of Britain, in the early a.d. 80s, which was decapitated and buried during a period of unrest on the northern frontier.

This article reviews the previous expansions advanced for a group of tile-stamps from London, reading P P BRI LON or the like, and supports R. G. Collingwood's claim in 1936 that it was ‘procuratorial’ by quoting evidence for minor procurators based on the headquarters-building at Combe Down, near Bath (RIB 179) and a clear instance of P(ROCVRATOR) on a bronze stamp of a bailiff of Matidia Augusta, niece of the Emperor Trajan. The writer lists seven main sites in London where these stamps have been found, and includes the tilery at Brockley Hill (Sulloniacis) as either the main or a subsidiary source for this building-material.

The report is focused on excavations in a suite of four rooms in the villa dating to the late third or early fourth century, associated with a plunge-pool excavated in the nineteenth century; the excavations were undertaken in advance of consolidation work. The rooms overlay a second- century bath-house also known from earlier work. The most important find was a hoard of fourth-century counterfeit coins which had been deposited in one of the rooms after it had gone out of use.

A half-life-sized copper-alloy head of a bearded man was published in the Portable Antiquities Scheme's report of finds from Roman Britain in 2009.1 The head was purchased by the Ashmolean Museum in 2011. In this paper evidence for the identification of the subject as a portrait of the emperor Marcus Aurelius is reviewed by comparison with metropolitan and other certainly identified heads of deities and portraits of the emperor. The technique and likely function of the head are compared with those of similarly worked Roman copper-alloy heads of emperors and deities found in South-East Britain. Finally, a brief account is given of geophysical survey and trial excavation conducted in 2012–13 in the field where the head was found. This offers a unique opportunity to explore the head's archaeological context.

The Romano-British theatre at Gosbecks is situated in the parish of Stanway, three miles west of the colonia at Colchester on a small promontory between the Roman river and a lesser tributary. It lies on the eastern edge of a thirty-acre area which was covered in Roman times by numerous buildings including a possible bath-building, the large Gosbecks temple standing within its own temenos, and a massive walled ‘fairground’. The theatre lies 125 yards due south of the temple and may well have stood within the ‘fairground’. The entire area (FIG. I) falls into a class of rural site widespread in Roman Gaul where large temples are associated with theatre, mansio and bath-buildings, but where private houses and town walls are absent.

The timber gateways of the Roman forts and fortresses of Britain show considerable variation, but with a few exceptions they fall into a series of clearly defined types, all capable of subdivision. They may be classified on increasing size and complexity, although, as will be shown in the final discussion, this arrangement has no chronological significance.

Brockworth is situated in the Severn Valley between Gloucester and the Cotswold escarpment. The parish is divided by the line of Ermin Street, with the church and Court lying to the north. The Horsebere Brook winds its way past the site from the slopes of the Cotswolds to reach the Severn about 8 km away near Gloucester. Three other westward-flowing streams cross the low-lying undulating country between Churchdown Hill, 4-5 km due east of Gloucester, and Robinswood Hill to the south, both outliers of the Jurassic escarpment. Over the Lower Lias clay are spreads of Superficial Deposit, here composed of gravel and sand intermingled with a yellow clay.

During the winter of 1981/2 Giles Swift of the Wealden Iron Research Group discovered in a ploughed field on Great Cansiron Farm, Hartfield, East Sussex (TQ 45603835) an area of burnt clay and Roman tile, together with a few pieces of Roman pottery. The site, which lies close to a small stream, is located between an extensive Roman iron-working site to the south-west and possible large Roman iron-ore quarries to the north-east (FIG. 1). In advance of further plough damage, during the summer of 1982 the Field Archaeology Unit (Institute of Archaeology) undertook a trial excavation and survey in order to attempt to interpret and date the site more precisely. This work was funded by the Department of the Environment and East Sussex County Council. The 1982 investigations revealed a well-preserved Roman tile kiln and a rectangular floor of tile and burnt clay. Unfortunately extremely inclement weather during the second half of the excavation meant that it was impossible, given the time and resources available, to finish excavating either of these discoveries. The farmer, Mr Udell, kindly agreed to leave and plough around the excavation area and a second season of excavations was undertaken in 1983 thanks to the financial backing of East Sussex County Council and Keymer Handmade Clay Tiles of Burgess Hill, Sussex. In between the two excavations, staff of the Ancient Monuments Laboratory carried out a geophysical survey of the area to the west of the tile kiln.

The theology of the Imperial Numen continues to stir vigorous debate. In an article recently published in this journal J.C. Mann has proposed a radically different interpretation of the concept as seen through Celtic eyes in the Roman provinces of the North-West. He lays down in the first place that it is epigraphically impossible for numinibus Aug. to refer to multiple living emperors, who would rather have been indicated by the reduplicated ‘g’. Nor can the reference be to the living emperor in combination with the deceased: deified dead emperors would certainly have had the divus title and could not in any case be credited with numen since they possessed no ‘divine power’. As a result, the formula n[u]minibus Aug. on an altar from Benwell (RIB 1330), for example, must be taken to refer to the numina of the reigning emperor, who in popular thought was considered to have multiple numina, powers ‘in every human field’ (p. 177). Long before its publication, an oral version of this thesis had convinced E. Birley, who on the strength of it completed both RIB 707 and 1330 in such a way as to refer likewise to the numina of the living emperor. Since this expansion affects the interpretation of epigraphical texts that are of interest in ways other than just recording the cult of the numen, the whole question merits re-examination.