This paper considers a new corpus of 490,154 Roman coins (site finds) which have been recorded from England and Wales. The corpus provides British and regional means to aid in the preparation of coin reports in line with Historic England guidelines, along with spatial data providing new opportunities for research. The methods of data collection will be detailed and some of the possibilities this dataset can provide presented through a number of case studies. Through the consideration of applied numismatic analyses, the social distribution of the material and, crucially, the spatial distribution of Roman coinage, we can identify new trends and patterns. Case studies evaluating the fourth century will emphasise the changing importance of settlements in Roman Britain and identify those linked with the late Roman state. Furthermore, the retraction of coinage distributions in the second half of the fourth century will be explored. Building on the national and site type means explored within the paper, the full dataset has been made available in a range of forms on the Archaeology Data Service and in an interactive map developed by Maploom.

Reductions in the cost of transporting manufactured goods have been an important element in economic development in the recent past, and previous research suggests that the Roman period in Britain also saw substantial reductions in such costs. The authors investigate how far it is possible to measure changes in transport costs by considering the spatial distributions of pottery from known Roman production locations over time. Their analysis of an extensive database of pottery assemblages is designed to evaluate a series of expectations concerning how reductions in transport costs may have affected such assemblages and their distribution. Results suggest that costs were reduced by a factor of about two, leading to related changes in pottery production, distribution, and consumption over time. The ability to quantify changes in transport costs opens new perspectives for investigating the general determinants of economic development using archaeological data.

This paper presents a new approach to an old problem, the provincial reception of the image of Roman emperors. Applying 3D computer modelling, we captured the portrait features of Hadrian as represented on coinage minted for the British province, produced a 3D model from a coin and compared it with the bronze head of Hadrian found in London. The aim was to test the possibility, previously posited by other scholars, that the London portrait might have been produced by an artisan who used coin portraits of the emperor as his main – if not only – model. More generally, the paper examines the dependencies of coinage and sculpture on shared models and applies new technology to Roman portrait studies.

Focusing on a period of social shift, from the Late Iron Age to the early Roman period (100 b.c.e.–c.e. 200), this paper examines how the value of juvenile (under 13-year-old) bodies changed. In exploring the fluctuation in burial numbers alongside the altering forms of juvenile graves, the paper details the ways in which children (1- to 12-year-olds) and infants (younger than 1 year in age) were identified in death, as well as the longevity of these identifications. It is argued that juveniles are less common than they should be in the funerary record. Given that this relative absence of juvenile burial was clearly socially mandated, the emphasis here is on better contextualising and interrogating the sporadic presence and deposition of such burials.

How did the Roman Empire supply and maintain its frontier garrisons? What was the impact on populations and landscapes of conquered territories? The Feeding the Roman Army in Britain project will answer these questions by establishing how soldiers were provisioned and how frontiers operated as economic as well as militarised zones.

The anaerobic conditions at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, close to Hadrian's Wall in northern Britain, have famously preserved a variety of finds made of organic materials, including wooden writing tablets and a pair of leather boxing gloves. Here, the authors re-examine a wooden object originally recovered in 1992, re-interpreting the find as a large, disembodied phallus. Stone and metal phalli are known from across the Roman world, but the Vindolanda example is the first wooden phallus to be recognised. Combining evidence for potential use-wear with a review of other archaeological and contextual information, the authors consider various possible interpretations of the function and significance of the Vindolanda phallus during the second century AD.

This article deals with curse tablets against thieves, also known as ‘prayers for justice’. In the first part, I offer a short introduction to the topic and the scholarly debate surrounding the definition of this type of inscription, concluding that a more emic approach can help us understand the complex nature of a technology that, far from being monolithic, evolved over time and space. In the second part, I compare the literary and epigraphic evidence (in Greek and Latin), pointing out the similarities and differences between our different sources of information. Finally, I turn to the handful of Latin curse tablets from Roman Britain in which the stolen object's value is divided between the principal and the invoked gods. In my view, this type of transaction should be analysed as a new take on the more traditional votum, in which legal concepts such as obligatio or ownership also play an important role. By establishing an almost contractual agreement with a deity, practitioners obtained not only divine assistance but also tangible evidence of the god's participation.

The large-scale provision of defenses around small towns in Roman Britain during the 2nd c. CE is without parallel in the Roman Empire. Although the relationship between defended small towns and the Roman road network has been noted previously, provincial-level patterns remain to be explored. Using network analysis and spatial inference methods, this paper shows that defended small towns in the 2nd c. are on average better integrated within the road network – and located on road segments important for controlling the flow of information – than small towns at random. This research suggests that the fortification of small towns in the 2nd c. was structured by the connectivity of the Roman road network and associated with the functioning of the cursus publicus.

This contribution presents the first overview of an integrated remote-sensing survey undertaken across Harpham Roman Villa, East Yorkshire, and its wider landscape setting. The survey revealed one of the largest Roman courtyard complexes in northern Britain, nestled within an impressive crossroads system that formed part of a multiphase ‘ladder settlement’. The paper considers the impact of the results on both our understanding of this unique landscape and broader methodological approaches to the study of rural settlement in Roman Britain.

Traditionally, Roman temples and shrines in Britain have been contextualised in relation to wider ‘Roman’ religious practices. Until recently, considerations of architectural form and named deities have dominated discussions. The wider turn in archaeological discourse recognising ritual in everyday contexts has highlighted the importance of lived experience and landscape practice in shaping belief. Here we reflect on the implications of such ideas when approaching ritual practice at Roman temples, using a recently excavated example from Wiltshire, southern Britain, as a case study. The exceptional artefactual assemblages from the site demonstrate the importance of local and regional landscape practices and belief in shaping ritual practice in a sacred space. In addition, geophysical survey and analysis of Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) finds suggests that those occupying the landscape had long-term access to wealth. Deposition in the temple itself indicates the continuing importance attached to prehistoric objects in the Roman period, but also to the adoption of new votive practices of miniaturisation, mutilation and sacrifice. These rituals, although part of wider grammars of religious behaviour, had their roots in specific local contexts. Our detailed analyses provide a picture of a temple dedicated to a previously unknown local god, Bregneus, framed against that of an active community involved in farming, iron processing, quarrying, hunting and woodland management.

This article records its author's travels to sites in Britain that either provide settings for or are relevant to the stories of the Cambridge Latin Course. A version of this article was delivered as an oral presentation, entitled ‘In the footsteps of Quintus Caecilius: visiting Roman Britain with the Cambridge Latin Course’, at the American Classical League Centennial Institute in New York in June 2019. The article provides an overview of the sites, attempts to situate them in the geography and history of Roman Britain, and considers how such knowledge might be of benefit to teachers and learners.

Mobility on the Tyne–Solway isthmus constitutes a gap in our understanding of the planning and functioning of the Roman frontier of northern Britain. Although the inflexible design of Hadrian's Wall appears insensitive to variations in local environment, identification of potential Roman-period fords suggests that securing river crossings was an important influence on military plans. The Roman army exploited established routeways to impose increasingly sophisticated systems to structure movement, initially via a system of forts, fortlets and towers—the Stanegate—and subsequently using a continuous barrier: Hadrian's Wall. As these measures evolved, so local communities experienced greater levels of military control and inequality.

This research explores the contribution bioarchaeology can make to the study of slavery in Roman Britain, responding to the calls by Webster and colleagues for the greater use of osteological and scientific techniques in this endeavour. It reviews the evidence for the bodies of the enslaved in the primary sources and bioarchaeological evidence from the New World and the Roman Empire. The paper aims to establish patterns of physiological stress and disease, which could be used to reconstruct osteobiographies of these individuals, and applies these findings to bioarchaeological evidence from Britain. It concludes that at the present time, it may not be possible for us to successfully separate out the enslaved from the poor or bonded labourers, because their life experiences were very similar. Nevertheless, these people are overlooked in the archaeological record, so unless we attempt to search for them in the extant evidence, the life experiences of the majority of the Romano-British population who were vital to its economy will remain lost to us.

The Iron Age and Roman periods are often defined against each other through the establishment of dualities, such as barbarity–civilisation, or spiritual–rational. Despite criticisms, dualities remain prevalent in the National Curriculum for schools, television, museum displays and academic research. Recent scientific studies on human origins, for example, have communicated the idea of an ‘indigenous’ Iron Age, setting this against a mobile and diverse Roman-period population. There is also evidence for citizens leveraging dualities to uphold different positions on contemporary issues of mobility, in the UK and internationally. This paper discusses values and limitations of such binary thinking, and considers how ideas of ambiguity and temporal distancing can serve to challenge attempts to use such dualities to map the past too directly onto the present, reflecting on recent social media debates about Britain and the European Union.

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.