An initial, superficial occupation (Period I, c. A.D. 43) of the site probably reflects a Roman military base of the Conquest period. The first formal layout (Period II, c. 44–50) included a main east-west street, north of which lay a metalled area and two wooden structures separated by a north-south road, again almost certainly part of a military base. A large scale Claudian redevelopment (Period III, c. 50–60) relaid both the east-west road and the metalled area. In the angle formed by these lay at least three large timber-framed buildings, on an east-west axis and probably consisting of ranges of rooms, at least one frontal verandah and two semi-basements; two of these buildings were divided from the third by a minor east-west road. The framed walls were infilled with wattle, daub or brick, over wooden sleeper-plates supported on trenched piles. The floors were of clay, some roofs tiled and many walls painted, one four times. Water was piped along the principal road. The layout, still reminiscent of military work, probably reflects the initiation of the civilian town east of the Walbrook which set the permanent street-pattern for the eastern half of the city. All the buildings on the site were destroyed by the Boudiccan fire of A.D. 60.

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.

Excavation at Honeyditches has revealed first century A.D. occupation in the Iron Age tradition, followed by Roman buildings. These included two parallel long timber structures, a large free-standing bath-house and a probable barn. These buildings, together with a house partially explored earlier this century, are interpreted as belonging to a villa complex, probably dating from the second to the fourth centuries. Norman pottery and occupation debris found over the bath-house are published in the Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Society.

The Biglands milefortlet, the first known site of the Cumberland coast defences, lies 5,500 feet beyond the terminal fort at the western end of Hadrian's Wall at Bowness-on-Solway. It survives as a low but prominent grassy mound (FIG. I), situated some 60 m from the edge of the salt marsh and with views which command the Cardurnock peninsula, the Solway estuary and the mountains of Galloway. Its height above the level of the highest tides is 4–5 m, the subsoil consisting of the bedded sands and shingle of a raised beach. The most prominent feature both from the air and on the ground is the silted ditch of the fortlet; it encloses an area which is subrectangular in plan, measuring c. 40 by 50 m. Only the southern end of the fortlet, where there are the farm buildings of Biglands House, lies concealed. There is no obvious sign of a break in the ditch and it was thus assumed that this was a ‘long-axis’ fortlet, orientated north-south, with a rear entrance as at Cardurnock. The air photographs also showed traces of a palisade revetting the rampart which, as was demonstrated by trial-trenching in 1954, was built up of marsh silt; but no structures were recovered in these excavations, and there was only a thin scatter of second-century pottery.

It has become fashionable in British archaeological circles to criticize airphotographers for continuing to reconnoitre the better-known districts such as the upper Thames valley or the Yorkshire Wolds, when they might be using their limited flying time to explore areas where little or nothing has yet been recorded from the air. The importance of making flights over the less rewarding ground is undeniable, but it is quite wrong to assume that the ‘classic’ crop-mark areas have nothing more to reveal. Every year brings major aerial discoveries on the chalklands and river-gravels of southern Britain, and their value is enhanced – not diminished – by the body of knowledge already available for each locality. Individual sites, although revisited year after year, may display vital new information only after literally decades of scrutiny, and continued surveillance is called for if air-photography is to play a fully effective part in archaeological exploration.

Air reconnaissance of the county south and south-west of the Humber has recently resulted in the discovery of two defended sites of Roman date. At Kirmington, South Humberside (TA 097113), photographs taken in the dry summers of 1974–6 (PL. XIV A) have gradually enabled the outlines to be drawn of a complex pattern of cropmarks (FIG. I ), the most prominent of which show the north-western angle of the double ditches of a large four-sided enclosure. The eastern and southern sides can only be traced with difficulty, and the south-eastern corner lies under the perimeter-track of the wartime airfield; but enough can be seen to indicate that the area within the ditches covered c. 8½ acres (3·5 ha). The double ditches, which are sufficiently large and regular to be described as defences, occupy part of an area covered by the irregularly planned roads and enclosures of a settlement. The roads are shown by negative (light-coloured) cropmarks, some of which apparently cross the defences in various places, while positive (dark-coloured) marks show the ditches of many small enclosures of different shapes and sizes. The drawing greatly understates the complications of these enclosure-ditches, which were probably many times recut to judge from the frequent indistinct marks on the photographs, too faint to be planned with confidence.

Some years ago, with the encouragement of Dr D. B. Harden, I began the pursuit of a type of segmented bead apparently rare in Romano-British contexts, but curiously frequent in the graves of Meroitic Faras. A preliminary note appeared in 1966; now, there is much to add, including (by the generosity of Dr Maria Dekówna and Mme Hanna Pawłowska of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences) analyses which in two cases hint at a common origin. But Faras and Britain are only the extremities of a distribution which proved, even when the Far East was excluded, to cover an immense area and a wide range of time. A particularly interesting thread is traceable for Roman times, suggestive of a link with the Mediterranean via eastern rather than western Europe.

Excavations and fieldwork at Brampton, Norfolk (TG 223237), 1965–1975, have added to knowledge of the Romano-British settlement first recorded in 1667. The settlement lies at an important cross-roads and river-crossing and covers c. 75 acres (30 ha); of this an area of c. 15 acres was enclosed by a defensive ditch, probably in the second century. Industrial activity on the site included large-scale pottery manufacture, and metal-working. Fieldwork and small excavations have been carried out each year since 1965 by a small group of amateur archaeologists under the direction of the author. Excavations by Mr C. J. S. Green for the Norfolk Archaeological Unit in 1974 will be published in a forthcoming report in the series ‘East Anglian Archaeology’. No final report can be published until more large-scale excavations have been carried out, but it is hoped that the following brief account of the site will give an indication of its nature and importance.

The two writers have been involved for a number of years with research on the Romano-British settlement at Lower Wanborough. Recent field-work, and aerial photographs taken of some remarkable cropmarks, have shown that the site was not an irregular linear growth along the main highway, but had developed a system of insulae in which was a substantial Mansio.

Antoninus ‘deprived the Brigantes in Britain of most of their territory, because they too (besides the Moors in North Africa) had entered on a war of aggression by invading the Genourian part, (which is inhabited by) subjects of the Romans’.

Bricks and tiles stamped with the initials of the Classis Britannica, the fleet of Roman Britain, have been found on nine sites around the shores of Sussex and Kent and at two localities in the Boulogne region of France (FIG. I). Supplemented by a few inscriptions on stone, they form the principal archaeological evidence for the presence of the fleet in the Channel.

In his discussion of the nomenclature of auxiliary regiments, G. L. Cheesman stated his belief that the adjectival form of a provincial name such as Cyrenaica, Moesica, or Syriaca implied not original recruitment in those provinces, but recent, perhaps lengthy, service in them. The existence of such units as cohortes II Hispanorum scutata Cyrenaica, I Lusitanorum Cyrenaica, and I–IV Thracum Syriaca lend solid support to his argument. It would have been entirely reasonable for a unit serving on an expedition to be known by the province with which it was usually associated, e.g. ‘the Syrian regiment of Thracians’. This would be especially true where there were a number of other regiments with the same ethnic title and otherwise indistinguishable, e.g. the numerous regiments of Thraci and Hispani. Here, the sense is rather, ‘the Syrian regiment of Thracians’. Subsequently, Cheesman qualified his generalisation when he observed that there must have been occasions when a form such as Cyrenaica would equal Cyrenaeorum? His modification was prompted by difficulties associated with regiments lacking an ethnic title and bearing only an adjectival form of a provincial name. He cites as examples the units simply designated as I–III Augusta Cyrenaica. It is to be assumed that he saw the same argument as applicable when he appended the ala I and the cohors I Britannica to the list of units whose origin he gives as Britain.

Dinorben, Denbighshire (SH 968757) has the distinction of being the only Welsh hillfort to produce items of undoubted Roman military equipment. This paper will be concerned with the origins, dating and probable historical context of two iron arrowheads. However, it is necessary to enumerate the other objects also which have been either termed ‘military’ in the Dinorben excavation reports, or which may originate from such a source.

An inscription found in 1803 at Old Carlisle (Olerica or Olenacum) has recently been the subject of some comment. R. G. Collingwood and R. P. Wright transcribe the text as: T(errae) Bata/u(o)r(um) Ate(ius) / Coc(ceianus) Au/g(usti seruus) uot(o) / s(olutus) l(ibens) a(nimo) fe(cit). They translate this: ‘To the Land of the Batavians Ateius Cocceianus, an imperial slave, made this willingly when released from his vow.’ It was this intepretation and expansion which caused Professor A. E. Gordon, the leading authority on Latin abbreviations, to comment: ‘Sometimes the expansion of the unusually large number of abbreviations arouses both admiration and skepticism.’

In Lincolnshire History and Archaeology i (1966), 29–32 Mr M. Todd published an article entitled ‘Roman Stamped Tiles from Lincoln and their Origin’. It deals with a good forty stamped tiles which were found in the area of the colonia Lindum or in its immediate vicinity, mostly in the primary walling of a bath-building of the original colonia. The stamps consist of four letters in relief, LVL followed by an A, D, E or F, within a plain, oblong cartouche. On several stamps the letters are separated by very faint traces of stops.

The study of a graffito on a sherd of a large storage-jar recovered from the River Thames at Amerden, near Taplow, Bucks., and from 1899 kept in the British Museum, and the making of a contact-drawing of it for the second volume of Roman Inscriptions of Britain has enabled the present writer to accept Haver field's suggestion that the vessel had been used as a cinerary urn, but to interpret the text written in Greek capitals as a memorial to a person who had resided in that locality, and in no way as a modern import from the eastern portion of the Roman Empire. A study of Greek and Roman names and word-forms has produced an occupational style hitherto unattested.

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.

We know more about the years 406–410 than we know about any other quinquennium of Romano-British history, apart from the periods that Tacitus describes for us. The standard account of what happened is that which C. E. Stevens published in an Italian journal in 1957. In the first part of this article I propose to argue that Stevens's paper contains a number of fundamental errors, that its chronology is untenable, that it ascribes monstrous mistakes to our authorities when they are not mistaken at all, and that its influence on later discussion of the problems has been unfortunate. It has left an unhappy mark, for instance, on the last chapter of Sheppard Frere's monumental Britannia, where it is generously described as ‘a very valuable discussion of sources and chronology’. Having considered the chronology of the period I shall attempt in the second part of this article to describe the nature of the events which brought about the end of Roman rule in Britain.