The Roman town of Venta Icenorum lies adjacent to the church of Caistor St. Edmund some three miles south of Norwich, Norfolk, where the circuit of its defences still survives impressively though everything within them has been flattened by agriculture. The publication of a famous vertical air photograph (PL. I) taken by the R.A.F. in the dry summer of 1928 aroused great interest, and funds were collected for the excavation of the town. The direction was entrusted to Mr. (later Professor) Donald Atkinson. Work started in 1929 and continued every year with the exception of 1932 down to 1935. Publication, however, did not keep abreast with excavation. A fairly full account of the first season's work was indeed printed, and the pottery-kilns excavated in 1930 were fully published; finally a report appeared of the pottery and coins found in 1929–31. For the rest there are the brief annual reports in ‘Roman Britain in 1929–35’ (JRS xix–xxvi), and a short summary of results compiled by Professor C. F. C. Hawkes with Atkinson's collaborations and published in 1951.

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.

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.

In addressing a CBA conference in 1965 Mr. C. E. Stevens performed his now famous ‘strip-tease act’, whereby he arrived at the conclusion that, save in a few exceptional areas, south-eastern England from Hengistbury Head to the Wash rarely produces Romano-British villas with patterned pavements. He related this phenomenon to the system of land-tenure which he believes he can recognize operating in south-eastern England during the Roman period—tenure in tir gwelyawg. Hence, the occupiers of the villas did not lay mosaic pavements because they ‘do not seem to have had the power of capital accumulation sufficient to place an order for them’. South-eastern England thus becomes a zone of ‘poor men's villas’ (to use Mr. Stevens' term), and sitting in the very centre of this zone are the villas of the Chilterns. Mr. Stevens generously recognized that High Wycombe was an exception to his rule, and rather more grudgingly admitted that Totternhoe might be another, but he was confident that ‘critics might find one or two more, but not many’. I have previously challenged, in passing, this harsh assessment of the Chiltern villas, but in the last two years additional information has come to light and the importance of well-dated mosaic pavements from villas has been emphasized by Dr. D. J. Smith's brilliant chapter on villa-mosaics in The Roman Villa in Britain.

Fishbourne is a village situated about one mile west of Chichester, of which it now forms an outer suburb, for it lies within the city boundary. The main trunk road to Portsmouth passes through it, with detached houses, mostly of Victorian style, on each side, while behind them on the north lay some 14 acres of farm land extending to the Coast Line main railway. Early in 1960 a trunk water-main was carried through these fields by mechanical excavation. Since 1805 Roman material has been known to exist here, and with the assistance of the engineers engaged in the work local archaeologists kept watch. The results were soon dramatic, for huge blocks of masonry were dislodged, together with tesserae, while the pottery found included some of Claudian date. Clearly a proper excavation was necessary, and arrangements for this were made.

The axiom ‘an army marches on its stomach’ applies to all armies of all times. The task of providing a constant and sufficient supply of food was by no means the least important part of the work involved in the day to day running of the Roman army. In time of war the troops would forage from enemy countryside, requisition supplies from defeated tribes or towns, and receive them from allies. According to Josephus the legionaries carried with them as part of their equipment sickles to reap the crops and also rations for three days. A scene on Trajan's Column depicts the legionaries carrying their kit on a stake; this consisted in part of a string-bag for forage, a metal cooking-pot and a mess-tin, examples of which have been discovered in most parts of the Empire. When an army was not on active service, the arrangements to supply food for men and animals were extensive and complex.

Up to one hundred years ago no difficulty was felt in the translation of this passage: thus Church and Brodribb translated the first part of it as: ‘In the fifth year of the war Agricola, himself in the leading ship, crossed the Clota, and subdued in a series of victories tribes hitherto unknown.’ But in their edition of the following year they found some difficulty in nave prima, and in this were followed by Furneaux; both editions still found no difficulty in supposing the Clyde to be the object of transgressus. Anderson, however, regarded nave prima as definitely corrupt, since he could find only one parallel (Livy 21,5,5) for the position of prima. He admitted that the point of crossing would, in the context, most obviously be taken as the Forth-Clyde Isthmus, but said, ‘It is much more likely that the starting-point was not the Isthmus at all, but either headquarters at Chester, or some point on the Chester-Carlisle line.’ Then, apparently assuming that the object of transgressus was concealed in the ‘corruption’, he suggested that the phrase was explained more fully in the following reference to operations opposite Ireland. Bury agreed with Anderson about the probable position of headquarters, but went further, in denying that ‘the Isthmus’ can be supplied from the context, appealing to ‘the method of Tacitus's narrative’.

The belief that legio VIII Augusta, either in whole or in part, had a share in the invasion of Britain in A.D. 43 has received notable support in recent years, not least from Professor S. S. Frere in Britannia. The participation of the legion is regarded as a probability by D. R. Dudley and G. Webster in both their recent books, and has been endorsed by the editor of Some inscriptions from Roman Britain, where the epigraphic evidence is given. The idea received no mention in the definitive works of either Collingwood or Richmond, and was rejected long ago by Ritterling. A fresh examination may therefore be in order of the actual evidence for the presence of the legion in Britain at this time.

An extensive Romano-British site, on the bank of the River Arrow at Alcester, Warwickshire, was excavated under the direction of Miss C. Mahany in 1964–65. The settlement contained, as well as habitation, what appeared to be an industrial area. In this area, with the remains of buildings, a pit was uncovered containing a muddy matrix in which was embedded a great number of scraps of leather. This so called ‘leather pit’ has been provisionally dated by Miss Mahany as belonging to the Antonine period, i.e. middle to late second century, or possibly a little later, on archaeological evidence. It was the infilling of this pit from which the insect fauna described here was recovered. The sample, collected by Professor F. W. Shotton, Drs. G. R. Coope and C. H. S. Sands and the author, was dug directly from the pit after the surface layers had been removed. The material was put into clean polythene bags and taken immediately back to the laboratory for processing. As the site of collection was well away from present-day buildings, the possibility of contamination by modern insects would seem to be remote.

The study of building-materials has been much neglected in the past, but it is not merely the technical examination of constructional minutiae but rather a key to wider aspects of economic history. How well did Romano-British builders exploit available building materials? How did such materials influence architectural styles? Where suitable stone was not readily accessible did they improvise, or import better material from a distance? What trading patterns can be discerned from the distribution of certain materials? Such questions can only be answered after detailed examination and identification of building-materials at particular sites, and there is insufficient material available as yet for a definitive survey. This article attempts, on the basis of such evidence as exists at present, to consider the building-materials, especially those of stone, employed in south-east England during the Roman period.

This small hoard was found in the clay and rubble filling of a shallow cellar in a house in Insula XIX. It had presumably been lost in the course of demolition and rebuilding. It cannot match either in interest or importance the famous Verulamium Theatre Hoard which Tessa Wheeler published in 1937, but it is still well worth notice. The Theatre Hoard showed conclusively that even the crudest or smallest of radiate copies were in circulation before c. A.D. 300 and made it hard to argue any longer for the production of such coinage in post-Roman Britain. Other evidence has since proved that all radiate imitation was more or less contemporary—in Britain as in Gaul.

Arecent paper made reference to the three iron beams found at the Chedworth villa. They were called ‘blooms’ and it was suggested that they were the product of the Forest of Dean ironworks. The place of origin may be correct, but it is no longer right to refer to these great objects as ‘blooms’. They had been manufactured for a definite purpose and had a definite structural part to play in building work, as is shown by a study of the find-spots, not only of the Chedworth examples, but also of others found in more recent years, and by their condition when found. Moreover they are also of interest as being probably the largest single objects yet known to have been manufactured by Romano-British smiths. Their function and manufacture has already been discussed by Dr. R. F. Tylecote, in spite of which many misconceptions still seem to survive about them. Indeed, I am grateful to Dr. Tylecote for discussing the Catterick examples with me soon after they were found; also to Mr. H. Cleere of the Iron and Steel Institute for arranging a study of the broken Catterick beam, and to Mr. L. Biek of the Ancient Monuments Laboratory for making the report available to me.

In the past few decades, the spread of the knowledge of ironmaking technology from its origins in the Near East throughout the Old World has been the subject of considerable study. Archaeologists and metallurgists have collaborated in the investigation of technological material, notably furnace remains, slags, and iron artefacts. Slowly a coherent picture is beginning to emerge, but many questions remain unanswered.

The student of inscriptions is often confronted with variations and peculiarities of spelling. Sometimes these are simply the result of errors on the part of the stone-cutter. But in many cases these variations are of much greater significance, since they derive from the spoken language. It seems reasonable to attempt to distinguish the latter from mere errors in stone-cutting. This paper aims to facilitate this for students consulting British inscriptions.

During the past few years several late Roman churches have been excavated inside the towns and forts along the Rhine-Danube frontier. These churches were built in the fourth and early fifth centuries, and were designed for congregational worship and the celebration of the Eucharist; in this respect, they differ from the churches which developed from memorial chapels in the cemeteries outside the towns. Baptism was one of the functions of these congregational churches, and at several of the excavated sites fonts have been found. These churches and fonts provide a number of parallels to an unexplained structure at Richborough and to various unexplained features of the excavations, suggesting that there was a congregational church of this type with a nearby baptistery inside the fort there.