In the eighteen years after its first discovery by Dr. I. Sgobbo in about 1920, rich prehistoric material was collected by quarrymen working the gypsum of the hill known as La Starza, Ariano Irpino, in the province of Avellino. It was very briefly published. In 1956 the author carried out a survey of the site, the results of which appeared in these Papers the following year. The report ended with a note that by then an exploratory season of excavation had already been carried out but that much more remained to be done. Further campaigns in 1960, 1961 and 1962 completed the immediate project, so that although the site is far from worked out, publication should not be held up longer.

The 1957 season was financed by funds from the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (through the Crowther Beynon Fund) and Pembroke College, Cambridge, and my mother, Mrs. D. M. Trump. The remaining seasons' work was made possible by the generous backing of Mrs. D. I. Ainley. The excavation team, which differed each year, was made up of myself, students from the British School at Rome and Cambridge University, and other volunteers, many of whom made no claim on the excavation fund for their maintenance at the site.

The pottery from the sites excavated in 1957 and 1958 came, in the main, from two strata: the earlier occupation material on, and thrown over, the scarp on the western edge of the knoll on the north side of the north-west gate and the tips of the great earth and stone rampart of the fifth-century Etruscan defences. The former consists of two groups which are drawn and described as such below, Groups Al and A2. The latter is made up of a variety of sherds dating from the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries B.C., probably scraped up from the surface earth nearby in the making-up of the rampart, so that only representative sherds have been published as types of some particular ware, as dating evidence, or as comparative material. The cuniculi found in both years' excavations, apparently broken into and deliberately filled prior to the building of the rampart and the rampart wall, contained, as well as a number of earlier sherds, a quantity of three specialised pottery types, and these have been published fully, Groups B, C and D.

There are, in addition several small stratified groups. First the early material: Group A3 on the eastern side of the knoll, and, on the western side, the filling of the post-holes and gullies of the earliest timber structures. Both these are considered with Groups Al and A2.

The River Tiber at Rome flows between the gentle, converging slopes of two extinct volcanoes, the M. Sabatini to the northwest and the complex known as the Alban Hills to the southeast. On the southern flanks of the M. Sabatini lie the Etruscan cities of Veii and Caere (modern Cerveteri) as well as many smaller Etruscan settlements. To the south on the western and southern slopes of the Alban Hills are such ancient towns of northern Latium as Ardea, Lanuvio and Velletri. In these same areas is an extensive development of underground passageways locally known as cuniculi, structures which are the subject of this report.

The cuniculus was widely used for a variety of purposes during classical and pre-classical antiquity in central Italy. Livy reports on cuniculi driven as military devices to gain access to besieged cities. The traditional account of the lowering of the Alban Lake, as reported by Livy, dates from the early 4th century B.C. Excavations in urban centres have demonstrated that the Etruscans and later the Romans used cuniculi for drainage purposes, and also as lateral collectors of underground water in wells.

This report deals with extensive systems of cuniculi found in the Roman Campagna but not directly related to urban or domestic development.

The classical topography of the southern and central Ager Capenas has been described in the preceding volume of the Papers (PBSR, xxx, 1962, pp. 116–207, hereafter referred to as Pt. I). In this, the second section of the report, the field survey is concluded with a description of the northern Ager Capenas. There follows a discussion of the development of settlement within the area as a whole and some of the more interesting archaeological features discovered during the survey. The final section deals with the characteristics of the Roman buildings in the area and incorporates a report on the excavation of a small Roman farm in the central Ager Capenas.

To the list of acknowledgements already made (ibid., p. 117) I would like to add the names of Miss G. D. Jones, Mr. G. Duncan, Mr. W. A. C. Knowles and Mr. D. W. R. Ridgway, who all helped in the preparation of the second part of this report.

This paper utilises evidence for the size of public gifts in Roman Africa collected in a previous article to make a series of deductions about the classes from which the gifts came and about the gifts themselves. Because the questions asked here are for the most part different from those considered in the earlier paper, a reorganisation of the material has been necessary, and a table of African donations of known amount is given at the end of the article (pp. 173–5). The sample has been confined as far as possible to material from the period between the accession of Trajan and the death of Gordian III (A.D. 98–244), and gifts clearly belonging to other periods have been omitted.

The topics discussed are, firstly, the distribution of wealth among the monied class; the conclusions are based on observations about the background and nature of Roman munificence, as well as on the tabulation of gift-sizes. Internal evidence suggests that it is, in most cases, legitimate to make rough comparisons between gifts from different points in the period without practical compensation for the effects of inflation. The second part of the paper contains estimates of the total number of donors in the period discussed; the frequency of donation among the decurial class (i.e. the members of the town-councils); the total sum subscribed in the form of public gifts in Africa within the period; and the fluctuations in the amount given from reign to reign. The series of estimates depends critically upon assessing the rate of inscription–survival with as much accuracy as possible, and this subject has been discussed in a separate Appendix (pp. 176–7).