For over sixty years the type of fastener under review in this note has been known to archaeologists in Britain as a dress- or cloak-fastener. It is characterized by a button-like head from the back of which a shank or loop projects. The shank is bent at an angle of 90° so as to lie roughly parallel to the head, but it remains slightly offset.

The mine workings at Dolaucothi have been a focus for considerable archaeological research during the better part of this century. They were first systematically described by Bosanquet and Haverfield in 1917, while their probable Roman date was underlined by the discovery of several well-preserved wooden objects (including a fragment from the rim of a drainage wheel of well-known type) when miners broke into underground stopes beneath the main opencast in the mid-1930s (FIG. I, NO. 4). The most detailed investigation of the site was undertaken in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Jones and Lewis. This saw a detailed survey of the principal surface workings, an examination of the Cothi leat and its associated features, the discovery of the so-called Annell leat, and the excavations within the newly-discovered fort under the village of Pumsaint. This work still forms the basis of our overall understanding of the early phases of exploitation at Dolaucothi, although much of the detail remains unpublished.

Religious syncretism in the ancient world is a topic of continual interest among scholars; for it concerns a fundamental aspect of cultural change. This is particularly apparent when studying the miscellany of beliefs attested in the alae and cohortes of the Roman army. Soldiers venerated the ‘official’ gods of the Roman pantheon, deities of specifically military interest, local gods and goddesses, and embraced some of the seductive eastern cults that swept the empire. In addition some probably continued to worship the gods of their regimental homelands. The myriad of ideas and practices involved are often impossible to reconstruct and need not delay us here; instead this paper aims to examine the role of religion in transforming the cultural identity of auxiliary regiments. This necessitates assessing which beliefs had the greatest significance to ordinary soldiers, a task complicated by the latter's poor representation in the epigraphic record.

There has been a hesitancy in academic discussion of Roman Britain to address the potential significance of the identity and agency of rural communities in shaping the provincial landscape. This article seeks to address the reasons for this before delineating some avenues by which we might better investigate this issue. Through two case studies the importance of kinship, agricultural peers and occupational identity (being farmers) are recognised as potential drivers for the course of rural life in Roman Britain. In so doing the extent to which ‘being Roman’ was really a central concern of many agricultural communities is questioned.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the construction, decoration and possible uses of Roman circular lead tanks which have been found in Britain. Twelve examples exist, plus fragments of perhaps two more, while one possible example is now lost. A short discussion of the possible functions of these tanks was published in 1943, when seven examples were known, and the tanks have also been considered in connection with Roman art and Christianity in Britain. Circular lead tanks would appear to have been a purely insular development since not one has been found elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

The episode of the usurpation of Carausius and Allectus has long attracted scholarly attention, not least because it is a light at the end of the long dark tunnel which comprises the history of Britain in the third century. The literary evidence for the period is comparatively abundant though it is of a tendentious nature. The extensive passage in the panegyric addressed to Maximian in 289 indicates the main events in the early part of the revolt whilst the panegyric presented to Constantius in 297, after his reconquest of the island, contains graphic details of the final defeat of Allectus. There is also a brief resumé of the reconquest in the panegyric composed in 310 for Constantius's son Constantine. Perhaps as important as these contemporary references to events is the silence of the panegyric of 291, addressed to Maximian, about affairs in Britain. These entirely laudatory sources are supplemented by the historians Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, both of whom wrote in the middle of the fourth century, and by Orosius who wrote in the early fifth. Medieval sources, which appear to add details of events not recorded in the ancient sources, are best ignored. In addition to these literary sources there is a body of archaeological data which is, at best, ambiguous as to significance and date. There is also a considerable body of numismatic material.

Amongst the most striking objects to survive from the three decades preceding the Roman conquest of Britain are the magnificent series of gold coins of Cunobelin. They are numerous and display an exceptional range of styles, from the traditional through the barbaric to the severely classical. Enough remain to permit a thorough die study, from which some interesting conclusions for the period can be drawn.

Those loosely planned road-side settlements, Strassensiedlungen, or ‘small towns’ and minor settlements as they are generally known in Britain, are a phenomenon common to all the provinces of the Roman Empire, but perhaps because of their very familiarity, and the difficulties attending study of their remains, they have never been systematically examined, even in a single province. The large-scale attention accorded by excavators to some major Roman towns has never been directed towards humbler settlements. A brief study of those in Germania Inferior and eastern Gallia Belgica was attempted by the late Franz Oelmann in 1922. Oelmann tried to demonstrate, on evidence that has not been greatly enlarged since 1922, that the Strassensiedlungen of northern Gaul, the Germanies and Raetia were principally settlements of traders, and not agricultural villages.

It is not widely appreciated that the Roman presence in North-West Europe radically transformed a number of basic technological processes, marking a fundamental break in native traditions at a mundane level which must have profoundly affected people's everyday experience. Archaeologically, amongst the more eye-catching innovations are the changes in the methods of skin processing and the manufacture of footwear. It is becoming increasingly evident that, prior to the Roman conquest, the native peoples of North-West Europe were unfamiliar with the techniques of vegetable tanning. Skins were treated with oils and fats or by methods such as smoking, and they continued to be processed in these ways in regions beyond the Roman frontiers. Since none of these curing methods results in permanent and water-resistant leather, artefacts made of animal skin will only survive under exceptional environmental conditions, such as extreme dryness (e.g. in Egypt), salinity (e.g. in the salt mines of Hallstatt), or in peat bogs, where a sort of secondary, natural tanning process has taken place. In contrast, true tanning using vegetable extracts gives a chemically stable product, resistant to bacterial decay, which survives well in damp, anaerobic conditions. The Classical world appears to have been conversant with vegetable tanning from about the fourth century B.C., but where this knowledge originated and how it spread is as yet unclear. As a direct result of this technological innovation, leather goods first become fully visible in the archaeological record of North-West Europe from the start of the Roman occupation. Shoemaking is equally affected by Roman practices, with the appearance of a variety of distinctive footwear styles which are technologically and stylistically unrelated to earlier, native types. The most obvious introductions are hobnailed shoes and sandals, but even the single-piece shoes (carbatinae) which are technologically similar to pre-Roman native footwear are totally different in concept (FIG. 1, No. 10).

Almost two decades ago, David Peacock documented for the first time on a systematic basis the presence of North African amphorae in Roman Britain. Since then, additional finds of similar material from recent excavations of Romano-British sites have greatly increased the initial number of examples listed by Peacock, bringing about a more complete picture of these imports.

Malain Vernhet has published in Gallia a summary of one of the most important discoveries made at La Graufesenque for many years; a mass of waste associated with a large kiln contained the work of about forty potters, some familiar in the last stages of the export-trade to Britain. Among the decorated bowls were some with the potter's stamp L.COSI, conventionally dated to the late Flavian period. Several of them bore reliefs which prove that the style continued down towards 120: thus, on one bowl, which is illustrated, we see figures of a seated warrior turning his sword on himself, labelled DECIBALV, and of a prisoner condemned ad bestias, identified as PARTV. AS M. Vernhet remarks, reference is to the suicide of the Dacian king, Decebalus, in 106 and to the Parthian triumph, which Trajan did not live to experience, in 117. The design thus epitomizes the great conquests of the reign, and in all its provincial crudity speaks to us directly of facts, away from which the noble commemorative monuments in Rome and at Benevento all too readily, perhaps, beguile us.

On 11 January 1975 a stone cist containing two inhumation burials and a series of iron objects was found in gravel-working at the Cairnmuirs Gravel Pit, west of the Roman fort at Camelon, Stirlingshire, now in the Falkirk district of the Central Region of Scotland (NS 860810). The two boys who made the initial discovery, David Vause and Wallace Wright, took a collection of bones and ironwork home, and their parents informed Camelon constabulary. The police took the matter up with Mr. J. M. Sanderson of Falkirk Museum and he asked the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland and the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate of the Department of the Environment for assistance in excavating the grave. Because of the risk of sandfalls, the excavation of what turned out to be the burial of two soldiers accompanied by their weapons was undertaken the following day by Dr. J. Close-Brooks, National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, Dr. D. J. Breeze, Department of the Environment, and Dr. J. N. G. Ritchie, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Under Scottish law, objects of archaeological importance (not necessarily of precious metal) may be claimed as Treasure Trove, and the finders appropriately rewarded; accordingly the Queen's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer claimed the weapons for the Crown and Mr. Vause and Mr. Wright have been rewarded for their prompt reporting of the cist. A second sword found by a bulldozer driver in the gravelworkings at a rather earlier date was handed over at the same time, and also claimed by the Crown. Two other deposits, one of them in a cist, were found at Camelon in 1922 on the south-east side of the site, and the opportunity has been taken here to publish new illustrations of these finds. This report comprises a discussion of the known history of the fort, a description of the excavation of the most recent cist and of the deposits found in 1922, a discussion of the mode of burial, the status of the soldiers and of the weapons, and finally a detailed description of the individual objects.

This paper provides an interim report on sixteen complete barrack plans obtained in the last fifteen years in excavations at the British northern frontier forts of South Shields and Wallsend (complemented by a pair of barracks partially excavated at Vindolanda in 1980 which have already been published). Its purpose is to disseminate more generally the fact that this newly obtained information changes our understanding of several aspects of the construction, function, and historical evolution of auxiliary barracks. It also tells us something more than we knew before about changes in the army as the institution that used the barracks, and of the life of the military communities that inhabited them. In some cases the buildings described here have already been fully published, or publication is imminent; in others, interim plans have been made available in disparate publications but it is likely to be a number of years before complete detailed excavation reports are issued.

In order to study the possibility that some samian (terra sigillata) vessels remained available and/or in circulation for quite some time, a review has been made of closed groups (especially grave-assemblages), as a useful starting point. This paper argues that it is reasonable to expect some complete first-century samian vessels to have survived into the second century; also that some second-century vessels had survived into the fourth century at least throughout Roman Britain.

‘The principal periods in the history of the monument were firmly fixed and the complicated relationship between its component parts was securely defined’. With these words Sir Ian Richmond in 1950 reviewed more than a decade's work on Hadrian's Wall. Ten years before he had written: ‘As the great scheme proceeded, modifications were introduced, some structural, of interest only in defining the order of progress, others amounting to a thorough revision of the design. The most important of the latter was the construction of forts on the Wall itself. His analysis of ‘the fort - decision’ remains unchallenged, but in his 1950 paper Richmond reported on details of the structure of the Wall: in particular those observed during the consolidation of Turret 26b and the relationship between the Narrow and Broad Walls. In conclusion he wrote: ‘Plainly these are minor puzzles beyond immediate solution here, important for those who would follow centuriae at work, yet not obscuring a vision of the main intention’.

The purpose of this paper is to draw together the results of a campaign of excavation and field-survey in the March area of the Cambridgeshire Fens. The work was carried out between 1958 and 1964, at a time when the last earthwork sites in the region were coming under the plough. That the excavations were undertaken before the destructive contemporary programme of deep cultivation began is a matter of some importance. Study of the earthwork sites showed that the third- and fourth-century buildings lay only a few inches below the surface and, although often constructed in stone, never possessed more than shallow footings. We may surmise that, unless a well preserved pasture site has escaped attention, deep ploughing has stripped off most traces of late-Roman structures on these Fenland settlements. Only the lower fills of the larger ditches and pits are likely to have survived intact.

In the summer of a.d. 122, Hadrian (a.d. 117–38) visited Britain as part of his first major journey. It is broadly accepted that the construction of Hadrian's Wall was inaugurated on this occasion. Following recent advances in Upper Germany where the limes palisade is now known to have been under construction when Hadrian visited the province, this paper re-examines the various strands of evidence for the early chronology of the Wall. It is argued that work started well before a.d. 122 and that it was in fact the ‘fort decision’ which resulted from the imperial visit. The revised sequence offers a fresh perspective on several classic Wall problems and prepares the ground for a new understanding of unique features like the milecastles and Vallum.

Windridge Farm lies approximately three-quarters of a mile to the south east of the Roman town of Verulamium (FIG. I) and about 400 yards from the eastern edge of Prae Wood. The finds of lead which form the subject of this paper were recovered over a number of years by several individuals with metal detectors and it is no longer possible to identify precisely and with confidence their exact find-spots. Certainly their distribution is fairly localised, the principal area of their recovery being centred on TL 124060. Sixty four lead objects have been recorded from the area and at least 50 more are thought to have been recovered. Thirty-seven are now in the possession of the Verulamium Museum (Accession Numbers SABMS 79.2960; 82.571–2; 84.1–25, 644–5, 1421–6,1435). The finders reported that the lead objects were found in small groups rather than individually, though no large hoards have been discovered. Although the area was field-walked by the local archaeological society, no further lead finds were recorded.