INTRODUCTION

The religious practices of Roman Britain and the Roman Empire in general have been the subject of many learned books and papers. It is not the intention of this small study to do anything more than consider some of the various categories of material recovered from Norfolk in the last three decades or so, and what that material may tell us about the various gods and goddesses worshipped in Roman Norfolk and the way in which they were revered.

There are practically no inscriptions on stone from the county, which is not surprising given the paucity of anything but flint in the area, and so artefacts recovered with the aid of metal detectors are of particular importance. The objects with which this paper is concerned, discovered as they have been in ploughsoil, have no archaeological context. Thus, there is no evidence for the way in which they were deposited. Nonetheless, these objects can in themselves tell a great deal about religious beliefs in Norfolk during the period of the Roman Empire. Since it stands to reason that objects with a religious function would have been used at religious sites, their discovery can also be used to answer the question of how many such sites existed in Roman Norfolk. It is very unlikely that these objects were casually lost or thrown away. Rather their context is, in the vast majority of cases, votive in nature; these were gifts to the gods that remain to offer mute testimony to the religious beliefs of the people who offered them.