This paper will present an analysis of one of the most common legionary fortress building types – the centurions' quarters, in an attempt to understand their usage and organisation, and the degree to which they were standardised. After looking briefly at centurions themselves, and especially their social backgrounds, to see what they might have expected of their houses, the paper will study the buildings' size and position within a fortress, and analyse their common features, internal structure, and the distribution of find types within them, in an attempt to identify different areas of use. Finally, an historical overview will be offered to show how the design of the buildings evolved over time, whilst comparisons with other structures will be used to see how they fit into the wider Roman building tradition.

In the mid-1950's attempts were made to solve Leicester's traffic problems by the construction of an inner ring road by-passing the present city centre around the clock tower. The projected line ran through the Roman and medieval towns of Leicester from the north-east corner to the medieval south gate, passing just west of the ancient site of the High Cross (FIG. I ). The engineering work for this road was expected to destroy substantial archaeological evidence of the history of the town, and the City of Leicester Museums, in association with the then Ministry of Works, planned a jointly-financed programme of excavations. The first was undertaken in Blue Boar Lane by Mr. J. S. Wacher. In 1961 Leicester Museums appointed a full-time Field Archaeologist to direct the work of rescue in advance of road building. The work recorded in this paper under 1961–4 was directed by M. G. Hebditch: that under 1965–6, and again under 1971–2, by Jean Mellor. In all its excavations, the Museum staff enjoyed the co-operation of colleagues in other departments of Leicester Corporation, especially those of the Engineer and the Estates Officer. A besetting problem has been the limited area for excavation available at any one time (because of irregular demolition and clearance of the site and the need to leave substantial areas for the support of adjoining buildings).

Unfortunately no map of the Roman world has yet been discovered that has survived directly from Claudius Ptolemaeus' work, conducted in Alexandria c.a.d. 120–160. However many maps have been produced from the data (8,000 geographic reference locations) contained in his monumental Geographia for the discovery of which we are indebted to Maximus Planudes of Constantinople c.a.d. 1295. The Geographia text and these maps vary in style from mainly Greek and Latin manuscript sets (codices) through a variety of printed and reproduced versions from the late fifteenth century even up to the present day.

A Roman Villa at Weekley in Northamptonshire (SP 885 818) was first referred to by eighteenth-century antiquaries, who stated that ‘pavements, foundations, pottery and a great deal of money’ had been ploughed up in a field known as Castle Hedges. The site of these discoveries is one mile north-east of what appears to be a fairly extensive Roman settlement on the northern outskirts of Kettering. The area is now under threat from ironstone-quarrying, and preliminary surveys were carried out during 1970 both from the air and on the ground. These indicate that the site began in the late Iron Age with a series of enclosures and occupation subsequently continued into the Roman period. A number of pottery kilns were found which probably date to the third quarter of the first century A.D.

This paper, with its appendices, gives a full account of the coinage of the Iceni in East Anglia, and brings together information much of which has not hitherto been published. A study of the coinage of this historic tribe at a turning point in Romano-British history may not be out of place in the first number of Britannia.

Following recent study and excavation of the defences, amphitheatre and forum-basilica of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum), challenging questions about the origins, development, decline and eventual abandonment of the Roman city invited fresh excavation of a representative insula. A well known, but nevertheless major deficiency of the Victorian and Edwardian excavations at Silchester is the almost total absence of chronology, either relative or absolute, such that we have little basis on which to determine the development of the city through time. In making the selection of an appropriate area in which to investigate the larger issues, consideration had to be given to a number of criteria: the chosen insula should have reliable evidence for the presence of buildings not recognised in the Society of Antiquaries' excavations of 1890–1909. In this way it would be possible to assess the extent of the loss of stratigraphie information as a result of the earlier excavation. Equally the selected insula should offer the prospect of investigating apparently blank areas which might, with modern methods of area excavation, yield evidence of timber-framed buildings which the early excavators had failed to recognise. Account also had to be taken of a distinctive element of the town plan of Calleva which includes buildings both aligned with the Roman street grid and oriented at a variety of angles askew to the streets in order to ascertain how far they shared a common history.

In tandem with the large-scale translocation of food plants in the Roman world, ornamental evergreen plants and plant items were also introduced to new areas for ritual and ornamental purposes. The extent to which these new plants, primarily box and stone-pine, were grown in Britain has yet to be established. This paper presents a synthesis of archaeobotanical records of box, stone-pine and norway spruce in Roman Britain, highlighting chronological and spatial patterns. Archaeobotanical evidence is used alongside material culture to evaluate the movement of these plants and plant items into Roman Britain, their meaning and materiality in the context of human-plant relations in ornamental gardens and ritual activities. Archaeobotanical evidence for ornamental evergreen plants elsewhere in the Roman world is presented.

Scholars of late Roman Britain will be familiar with the name of the Attacotti, who appear in several fourth- and fifth-century Roman texts. Ammianus refers to this mysterious people attacking the British diocese in the second half of the fourth century. In the same period the promiscuous marriage customs and, more so, the ferocious cannibalism of this ‘British race’ shocked a young St Jerome. It is somewhat surprising therefore that the Notitia Dignitatum lists a number of Attacotti units among the auxilia palatina stationed in Gaul, Italy, and Illyricum, and in the last instance their presence is also attested in epigraphic sources. Scholarly consensus has been content to regard the Attacotti as just one among the many minor and otherwise unknown tribes of Ireland or north Britain. It is interesting to note, however, that for a brief period Ammianus ranks the Attacotti alongside the Scots, Picts, and Saxons as a threat to the north-western frontiers of the Empire. It is also to be noted that the recruitment of the Attacotti into the Roman army, seemingly in considerable numbers, is apparently unique among the peoples of the British Isles beyond Roman rule. The writer's purpose is to assess the fourth- and fifth-century evidence for the Attacotti and to examine the problems of their identification and origins, together with their relationship to other peoples hostile to the late Roman diocese of Britain. The results of this examination will demonstrate that the character of the Attacotti and the location and nature of the threat they posed have been misunderstood. This study will suggest circumstances for their recruitment and transfer into the continental comitatus, set in the wider context of the on-going debate concerning the presence of barbarian troops in later Roman Britain, and the size and nature of the British garrison in general. Furthermore, at a time when there are many studies of the mutual relations between the Roman Empire and its neighbours, this contribution seeks to shed new light on the interaction between Roman Britain and Ireland, a subject relatively neglected by Roman historians, despite considerable advances in the fields of early Irish history and literature.

The victories that followed Claudius' invasion of Britain in A.D. 43 were celebrated by a lavish and extensive triumph in Rome in the following year. Moreover, as a more permanent and visible reminder of the emperor's successes, two victory arches, one in Gesoriacum (Boulogne), his embarkation point, and the other in Rome, were decreed by the Senate. No trace of the Boulogne structure has survived; the Roman arch, on the other hand, is one of the most intriguing monuments of the Julio-Claudian period, presenting scholars with a series of epigraphic and architectural problems. The purpose of this paper is primarily to attempt to throw some light on the epigraphic issue, but since, as will become clear, any discussion of the arch's inscriptions must take place within the context of its architecture and decoration, the latter will be considered first.

There is only one piece of explicit evidence that the Twentieth Legion was ever based at Wroxeter (Viroconium), a tombstone discovered in 1752, since published as RIB 293. That the evidence is explicit, however, has been questioned.

The recent discovery at the legionary lime-kilns at Iversheim in Lower Germany of an inscription recording a magister calc(ariorum) in legion XXX Ulpia Victrix, a post hitherto unattested in the Roman army, raises the question of the use of the title magister in the lower ranks of the army.

It is generally held that Hadrian's Wall was abandoned c. A.D. 140 in favour of a heavily garrisoned Antonine Wall, then reoccupied about A.D. 158 upon withdrawal of troops from Scotland and the Antonine Wall. Almost immediately troops returned to Scotland, though the northern garrison was thinner than before. This second, brief occupation of the Antonine Wall is now most often supposed to have ended at some date early in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian's Wall then being reoccupied.

The written sources for Roman Britain, especially after the first century A.D., are so scant that our information must come very largely from archaeological discoveries. While these have thrown light on many aspects of Britain during the Roman period, we are still very much in the dark about one important feature of Romano-British life, the intellectual and cultural activities of the well-educated Briton. It is in the fourth century that the problem becomes particularly acute; Britain escaped much of the unrest that plagued the continent and thus enjoyed an era of peace and prosperity, a prosperity reflected in the stimulus given to construction of villas on a grand scale and often with fairly lavish interior decoration. It is a period when we should naturally expect a parallel flowering in the level of cultural life. The sources, however, are virtually silent on this topic and we must base our knowledge on the deductions that can be made from the evidence of physical prosperity; a useful criterion of cultural and intellectual activity is interest in the literary classics, but while it may be reasonable to assume that in his schooling the Romanized Briton would receive some grounding in the major works of Latin literature, archaeology has provided relatively little evidence that this was in fact the case. The known examples have been so frequently cited and illustrated that they have produced a general impression that they are copious. In fact, there is prima facie evidence of only one writer, the poet Vergil; the allusions are limited to one of his works, the Aeneid, and are far from numerous. My present purpose is to provide a catalogue of the allusions in Roman Britain to Vergil's poem, to assess the evidence that they provide for a general knowledge of the Aeneid, and to show what I consider to be the special significance of one example, the mosaic from Lullingstone Villa in Kent.

In Rome, during the late Republic, it became increasingly usual for those who had undertaken the construction of a building, whether as civic magistrates ex officio or as private individuals, to ensure that their achievements would be remembered by having the building inscribed with a record of what they had done. The practice became commonplace in the provinces of the Empire, on civic buildings, in military forts and on private funeral monuments. Sometimes, surviving inscriptions can be related to archaeological remains of the buildings to which they belonged. More often they cannot be so related; but even then, they may provide valuable information about the nature of building construction and who was responsible for it.

Recent archaeological work in Colchester has shed considerable light on the origin and growth of the Roman town. The excavations at Balkerne Lane have yielded a series of six periods which can be related to changes in Colchester's street-plan and defences. This article is not a comprehensive interim report on all recent work but instead presents the results which have a direct bearing on Roman Colchester's development. Particular emphasis has been placed on the evidence relating to the site of the legionary fortress and its apparent re-use as the basis for the new colonia. Descriptions of research on the Balkerne Gate and of the section across the defences at Lion Walk have been included as they are central to any study of the development of Roman Colchester's street-plan. It must be stressed that the conclusions presented here are provisional, pending the definitive excavation reports, which will be based on a fuller assessment of the evidence recovered than is yet possible. This applies particularly to the sequence of occupation and defences at Balkerne Lane. A description and discussion of the evidence relating to the end of Roman Colchester and its relationship to the Saxon town will be dealt with elsewhere.

Existing arguments about the role of the late Roman coastal forts of south-eastern Britain turn largely on the monumental nature of their architecture, evidence of Saxon raiding in the contemporary historical record and the reference to the comes litoris Saxonici in the Notitia Dignitatum. These factors have ensured that the forts have been seen as a comprehensive defensive system to keep the Saxons from raiding Britain. In recent years, however, the traditional interpretation has been questioned and it has been suggested that the forts were not a series of naval police-stations, but trans-shipment centres. This paper will review the evidence to consider if there is indeed an alternative explanation for the construction of the forts.

Since 1856 when Sir James Simpson first asked the question ‘was the Roman army provided with medical officers?’ innumerable articles and books have been written on the subject. This paper does not intend to repeat the many points already raised concerning medicine in the Roman Empire but merely aims to assess the evidence for health care in the military zone of North Britain in the first four centuries of our era. Evidence from elsewhere in Britain and the Empire will be used only to clarify details, the geographical area covered being confined to the region north of Catterick and south of the Antonine Wall.

In the summary of the Roman coins published in the Fifth Richborough Report, I made my first attempt at expressing the coin-finds from an archaeological site in a way that would facilitate comparison with other sites. Some problems and errors of that method have already been dealt with in the Numismatic Chronicle and need not be further discussed here. It was then already obvious that before the coins from one site could safely be evaluated, a background knowledge of the coinage of the Roman province or area in question was essential, together with a knowledge of the variation of coin-finds from area to area. This sample of site-finds from varied sites in England is offered as a fourth instalment of an examination of groups of coins stretching from Rome, through northern Italy and southern and northern France, to the British frontier. Lists of coins from northern Italy, southern France and northern France have been published in the Numismatic Chronicle. I hope that a comparison of the coins from these four areas will appear following the present survey, in the next volume of Britannia.