Hadrian's Wall studies owe a great debt to those who raised the flag of revolution in 1848. They forced John Collingwood Bruce to abandon his planned holiday in Rome and visit Hadrian's Wall instead. Although he is known to have visited the Wall as a boy, a student, and a young man, now, at the age of forty-two, Bruce commenced the study by which his name is principally remembered. Bruce's Handbook to the Roman Wall remains the primary academic guide to Hadrian's Wall. Four successive editors, and now myself, the sixth including Bruce, have revised — or are revising — the Handbook in ten editions since Bruce's death: thirteen editions so far. This discussion flows from the work of editing the new edition of the Handbook, which is due to be published in 2004, and of considering the contributions of the successive editors.

The flat-topped hill of Burnswark broods over the surrounding landscape of southern Annandale. Its Iron Age defences enclose an area of 7 ha, modest when set against the hillforts of the neighbouring Tyne-Forth province, but without equal in Dumfriesshire. Its situation has often evoked comparison with the 10.5 ha site of Masada (Israel), but, even allowing for occasionally steep slopes rising some 70 m from its base, Burnswark's defences cannot match the formidable 250 m cliffs of the Judaean site.

Francis Haverfield, the acknowledged master of modern study of Roman Britain, died in 1919 at the age of fifty-nine after a twelve-year tenure of the Camden Chair of Ancient History at Oxford and an Oxford career which had begun in 1892 with a Senior Studentship of Christ Church. Under the terms of his will a substantial bequest was made to Oxford University in support of research on Roman Britain, a subject which he had done much to place upon a secure academic footing before 1914, most notably by the more detailed study of inscriptions. In 1921 the University brought together a group of scholars who would serve as Administrators of the Haverfield Bequest, their duties being to develop policy for the direct use of its funds and to receive applications from other bodies and individuals. It was Haverfield's express wish that a prime and particular objective of the Bequest would be the production of a corpus of Roman inscriptions in Britain. This has been a central concern of the Administrators from the beginning and this remains the case today.

The text published here was found in 1994 during excavation at 1 Poultry in the City of London (TQ 3258 8110), on the north side of the main east–west road of Roman London just west of the Walbrook stream, in a layer of debris which post-dated the destruction of a roadside building in a late Flavian fire. It is only the second stilus-tablet ‘page’ from London to have been read almost in full. It is a formal and formulaic text but, to a modern reader, its legal language makes this human document still more disquieting.

Publications concerning the early worldwide history of the domestic cat (Felis catus, also known as Felis domesticus) normally concentrate on ancient Egypt. All the evidence now indicates that the domestic species evolved in Egypt, entirely or at least principally from the North African wildcat, F. silvestris libyca; one authority suggests that there was also some admixture of the Jungle Cat (F. chaus), another small, wild felid frequently shown in ancient Egyptian art. The role of the domestic cat in the Graeco-Roman world tends to be treated somewhat sketchily in general books, since the literary and archaeological evidence for the spread of domestic cats from Egypt in antiquity is very slight, but two important recent volumes have attempted to redress the balance by examining this scanty evidence in detail.

Romanization is a term that people currently love to hate. Few these days approve of the view that Romanization was about bringing an inherently superior Roman civilization to the natives. Many would go further and attempt to replace the term altogether — the most successful of these attempts being Woolf's focus on what it meant to become Roman. The heart of Woolf's argument is that being Roman was not a static quality that people embraced or rejected, but rather a set of cultural forms always in the process of ‘becoming’ and that all within the Empire participated in its creation. ‘Gauls were not “assimilated” to a pre-existing social order, but participated in the creation of a new one’. Roman culture was an entity created anew in different parts of the Empire at different times, through the actions of all groups, and it was not just native peoples who were being Romanized through the expansion of Empire, but also the Romans themselves. The view of mutual creation is one we find attractive. However, there is one element of the argument that we would like to qualify and that is that the process is seen as primarily happening through the élites and the new urban centres created within the Empire — ‘A symbolic system did exist in the Roman cultural system, but it was not located in any one place or region but rather in the set of manners, tastes, sensibilities and ideals that were the common property of an aristocracy that was increasingly dispersed across the empire’.

Studies of the presence of Christianity in Roman Britain occasionally utilise a form of ‘negative evidence’: the destruction of pagan images. That this destruction is iconoclasm carried out by Christians is too readily assumed. Christian iconoclastic attacks did occur elsewhere in the Roman Empire, the question is whether we have been uncritical in automatically applying such evidence to the damaged Romano-British images. The apparent preference for certain parts of statuary, coupled with the occurrence of pieces in deposits that would, under any other circumstances, be regarded as ‘votive’ or ‘ritual’, suggests that these images may have been broken for reasons other than that of straightforward ‘destruction’. It is possible that some of these images may instead have been deliberately fragmented, with the resulting pieces retaining meaning and receiving special treatment and deposition. The aim of this paper is to question the validity of interpretations that suggest iconoclasm and to put forward an explanation based upon the theories of fragmentation as an alternative explanatory framework. By examining the high proportion of certain ‘body parts’ in the archaeological record, the contexts in which these occur, and the possible differing treatment of statuary of different materials and sizes, it is hoped to demonstrate that iconoclasm cannot account for all of the instances of image ‘destruction’ in Roman Britain.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the significance of the mosaic designs employed in Roman houses. Studies have concentrated on establishing the mythological sources of the images chosen, and on describing the social and architectural contexts within which such art was used. It has long been noted that some of the subjects preferred in fourth-century Britain suggest allegorical references to the hereafter, although it has also been observed that the ‘search for profound and coherent allegories may exaggerate the significance which the wealthy British patrons imparted to the floors of the great halls or dining-rooms of their villas’. Ling, in particular, has cautioned against reading exaggerated meanings into ambivalent images that may simply have been chosen to vaunt erudite taste.

This paper explores the implications of re-used Roman building-stone for an apparently ‘lost’ site of possibly military significance in eastern Norfolk. Herein we revisit the low-lying peninsula (FIG. 1, A–B) between the marshy estuaries of the Bure and Yare where, in the parish church of St John the Baptist, Reedham, a grey-weathering quartzitic quartz sandstone (grey quartzite), suggested to be from ‘an exceptionally large Roman building near Reedham’, has apparently been exploited. Threefold grounds were cited at this first examination by one of the present writers. The stone is associated with abundant Roman brick and tile, and some blocks present chamfered edges and dressing marks ‘similar to those that occur on Roman monumental buildings’. Reportedly, the rock resembles stone used in the Roman shore fort at Brancaster on the North Norfolk coast, although no petrographie or mineralogical details are actually cited by Rose.

The 79 rotary querns described here are part of the Silchester Collection housed in Reading Museum. These were retained during excavations at the Roman town carried out between 1890 and 1909 and published annually in Archaeologia by the Society of Antiquaries. Although eleven items are marked with what are thought to be the original markings of the excavators indicating the insula from which they came, most are unmarked. It is assumed that the unmarked querns in the store are from Silchester primarily because the Silchester Collection has always been stored separately from the rest of the archaeological collection in Reading Museum. Some of the querns from Silchester may be from the Joyce excavations in the town but material from other excavations, including those by Boon, Cotton, and Richmond, was boxed separately. The finds numbers used here are those allocated by the museum and where a finds number is referred to in the text, this should be prefixed with the museum code 1995.90. The 79 querns comprise 34 upper stones, 42 lower stones, and 3 unknowns.

A 10-ha site discovered on Langwood Ridge, a spur of Chatteris Island, during the Fenland Survey is amongst the largest open Iron Age settlement scatters known in Britain (Site 26; TL4180 8520). Correlating with a series of linear cropmarks and the possible outline of a stone building on aerial photographs, in the course of the survey a distinct Roman component was also identified. This multi-period settlement, whose ‘in-fen’ situation is directly comparable to Stonea, was assessed by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit of the University of Cambridge in the winter of 1993 in conjunction with the Fenland Management Project (FMP). Nine other Iron Age/Roman scatters are known upon the ridge, including two within the immediate vicinity (Sites 24 and 25; FIG. 2). Moreover, cropmark complexes, respectively involving large field boundaries and more minor paddocks, lie just north-east of the main scatter (Sites 12 and 13). The nearest, the Site 12 field-system, was also trenched in conjunction with the Site 26 fieldwork. Given these densities, one theme of the programme was that of site definition; it is difficult to know where each site begins and ends. As a result, in part, of not being able to adequately delineate the allocated scatter, the investigations grew and to provide broader landscape context neighbouring sites were also sampled (Sites 13, 14, 23–25, and 29).