This paper is an attempt to address some of the theoretical issues relating to the study of Roman treasure hoards from Britain. Some years ago the main problems were succinctly and helpfully outlined by Reece, but the study of treasures has remained unfashionable amongst those who have been interested in theoretical approaches, and in recent years few scholars of Roman Britain have devoted much thought to their classification and interpretation. Although many of the points raised below may appear obvious, it is clear that this subject requires more intensive debate, and an attempt to set out some basic parameters is overdue.

Over recent years Northampton Museums and Art Gallery has built up a good working-relationship with many metal detector users, operating within the Northamptonshire county boundaries. This has led to a marked increase in the reporting of Iron Age coins to the Museum for research and study. Of the 236 coins recorded from the county to date, 56 per cent have been reported since 1980. Of these, 75 per cent (or 100 coins) have been reported since 1990 (when this author started work at the Museum).

One of the most puzzling problems of ancient geography relates to the turning of Scotland, whereby in Ptolemy's map of the British Isles Britain (or Albion) is abruptly turned to the east from approximately Ptolemy's latitude 59° north, effectively the Tyne/Solway line. As a result the area we now refer to as Scotland is shown coherently through its coefficients but overall at approximately right-angles to the southern part of the country. Ptolemy's account of the geography of ancient Britain is fundamental to any study of the province, and particularly the military campaigning in the North. It is therefore essential as a subject of study for anyone involved in the evolution of the province or, at a very different remove, the underlying problems of understanding the contribution of ancient geographers to what Ptolemy himself called ‘chorography’, the geography of a region or particular area.

Usk (Burrium) has long been considered a Roman site. Its identification as a pre-Flavian military site was made by Boon following his reassessment of material recovered in the nineteenth century. A series of excavations was undertaken subsequently between 1965 and 1976 by Professor W.H. Manning on behalf of University College, Cardiff and the Department of the Environment (later the Ancient Monuments Branch of the Welsh Office). Following the creation of the Welsh Regional Archaeological Trusts in 1975, further work in Usk has been carried out principally by the Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust.

The practicalities of building-construction, timber buildings, and the physical effort of supporting military campaigning are not well covered in the literature. The majority of works on Roman buildings are concerned with stone and concrete structures, with an emphasis on public buildings, aqueducts, architectural appearance, dating, and historical associations. Recently there has been an interest in technical matters, and in reconstructions, but the emphasis is still on stonework and concrete and on appearance; discussion of the scale and method of supply of materials and labour is absent or very generalised. Work on constructional timbers (until recently somewhat lightly considered in excavations) tends to be confined to the largely descriptive.

The building of some 75 miles of massive curtain-wall, incorporating forts, milecastles, turrets and bridges, together with a further chain of forts, milefortlets, and turrets 32 miles long on the Cumbrian coast, represents an impressive civil-engineering undertaking by any standards. The fact that this was accomplished in a relatively short space of time on the remote northern fringe of the Roman Empire makes the achievement even more remarkable. Unfortunately, there is a lack of firm evidence for many aspects of the building of the Wall, so that it is impossible to assess precisely the scale of effort and organisational complexity involved in this operation. Many details of its original structure remain a matter for conjecture, since it has nowhere retained anything like its original height, and large sections of its length lie beneath buildings or roads, or have been destroyed by quarrying, cultivation, or the robbing of stone for construction. Alterations during the three centuries of Roman activity on the Wall have, in many cases, obliterated evidence of the earliest structural features. The actual source of much of the original building material is uncertain, so that transport routes and distances must remain a matter for debate. There is little archaeological record of Roman transport methods, and depictions of vehicles, such as those on Trajan's Column, owe more to artistic licence than to realistic detail, so that here again methods can only be conjectured. Literary record of happenings in Britain around A.D. 120 is sparse and precise dating of events, such as Hadrian's presumed visit to Britain, rests largely on a concensus of opinion based on circumstantial evidence.

Surveys by the writer in Britain and Germany have recently revealed a consistent pattern of Roman frontier communications in which each system's minor installations were sited so as to be able to see, and thus to signal to, their nearest fort, whilst the forts themselves could be linked to form a unified chain. But, until recently, the Antonine Wall appeared so different that it seemed unlikely that it operated in the same way. Comparing the two British Walls, both share the basic framework of a rampart and ditch and the change from stone to turf construction, on the northern system, is mere detail, but differences in the garrison installations did seem to have been of operational importance. For example, the inter-fort spacings of the Antonine Wall were much shorter, varying from 1.56 to 3 Roman miles, as against 6 to 9 on Hadrian's Wall – producing 17 known (including Carriden) and several suspected forts in c. 40½ Roman miles, as opposed to 16 in 80 Roman miles on the southern Wall. Moreover, many Antonine Wall forts were too small to have held a full auxiliary unit and there seemed to be no sign of a fortlet and turret system.

The spread of Roman material culture in Britain in the decades before and after the Claudian invasion has long been an important field for scholars of Roman Britain. Two traditional concerns have been the supply of the Roman army and the distribution of Roman items to civilian and native populations during this transitional and formative period. These areas have often been studied independently of each other. The examination of the supply and spread of material culture is valuable in its own right, but can contribute to our understanding of broader developments such as the impact on indigenous populations of Roman culture, the nature of the Roman economy, military organization, and Romanization. It is the intention of the current paper to outline and consider the incidence of one class of Roman artefact in a region of Britain and to demonstrate how the comparative study of such material may assist our understanding of social and economic developments in the first century A.D. The artefact type is pottery and the area of study is the eastern side of England from Leicester to Co. Durham. The perspective is chronological and comparative and it draws principally upon quantitative data.

The good survival of ceramics in the archaeological record has ensured that pottery has played a major role in the study of ancient industry and trade. How far Roman pottery can be used as a proxy for understanding the organisation of other industries is not a debate we wish to enter here, but it is clear that there remain important areas to be researched before the usefulness of pottery is exhausted. There have been significant advances in understanding over the last twenty-five years, with research concentrating more on characterisation, and the nature and scale of distributions, than on typology and chronology. The benefits of adopting a quantitative approach have been well rehearsed, although not always accepted. In this way, such research has made a major contribution to the ongoing debate about the extent to which pottery production and supply, and hence the economy as a whole, were controlled by market as opposed to institutional interests such as the state and, in particular, the Roman army.

Evaluation excavations undertaken in early 1994 revealed elements of a ditch system and a pottery kiln within the confines of RAF Catterick (NGR SE 24350 96900). The site is located on river gravels close to their interface with the Boulder Clays that occupy the areas to the west and south. The River Swale lies some 700 m to the east and the site forms part of the Roman roadside settlement known at Bainesse Farm located on Dere Street some 2 km south of Cataractonium Roman town. Other work undertaken as part of the evaluation programme demonstrated that the roadside settlement extended for up to 750 m south of Bainesse Farm, which indicates that the site extends for approximately 1 km along Dere Street. There is little or no evidence for the presence of structures on side roads away from Dere Street, although the work undertaken in 1981–82 did demonstrate the existence of two strip-buildings, set one behind the other, in some of the building plots. The kiln site lies on the eastern periphery of the settlement and is quite possibly part of a zone of industrial activity around the fringes of the site. The latter suggestion arises from the discovery of a scatter of slag during fieldwalking undertaken as part of the evaluation that appeared to define the limits of the settlement to the south and west.

This article offers preliminary editions of three texts discovered at Vindolanda in the excavations of 1993. These seasons produced a total of about 400 ink tablets and 46 stilus tablets. Added to the yields of the earlier seasons of the 1990s, we estimate that there are between 70 and 80 substantial new ink texts which we hope to publish within the next three years.