The achievement of textile producers in Roman Britain is highlighted most strikingly by two sets of entries in the Edict of Diocletian, a conspectus of traded goods and services available across the Empire, published in A.D. 301. The British birrus, a hooded cape of wool, is ranked equal sixth in a list of fourteen categories of birrus distinguished from one another by price and quality. A corresponding, but shorter, list of tapetia, wool rugs, puts both the British first-class and second-class grades ahead of all the rest: the British tapete, in short, was second to none. No other British product was deemed worthy of mention by the compilers of the Edict; prima facie, therefore, one could argue that textile production was Britain's leading industry by the late third century A.D. Can such a notion be substantiated?

The evidence for an altar tomb of the Procurator of Britain, C. Julius Classicianus, consists of a richly carved bolster stone and two substantial lettered fragments, found at the foot of a Roman bastion of London's city wall during two excavations separated in time by eighty years. Reunited. at the British Museum in 1935, they form one of the most important and beautifully lettered archaeological documents of Roman London.

The purpose of this study is to reassess the information contained in the worked faces of each fragment, to review the assumptions which led to the disposition of the fragments in their present setting, and to consider whether a measured survey of lettering and layout might contribute to a fuller reconstruction of the tomb and its text.

Artificial illumination is one of the most taken-for-granted features of modern life but in antiquity the availability and use of lamps was much more restricted. In Roman Britain, lighting equipment was rare and the use of ceramic lamps appears to have been largely limited to military sites and large urban centres. The so-called ‘lamp factory’ in Colchester is not the only site in Roman Britain to have revealed evidence for lamp production but it is probably the most outstanding. The extensive evidence for Roman lamp production near modern West Stockwell Street in Colchester takes the form of excavated structures as well as of a large and closely dated assemblage of lamps and moulds.

The Claudio-Neronian kilns at Greenhouse Farm are one of the few extensively excavated pottery production sites of this period in Cambridgeshire. The analysis presented in this paper attempts to do justice to this fact as well as touching on some broader themes; divided in two parts, the first discusses the site, kilns and pottery production, the second tackles the broader issue of early (i.e. pre-Flavian) pottery production in the region. Apart from the military kilns associated with Longthorpe in Peterborough, the only other comparable site of this date in the county is that at War Ditches, Cherry Hinton, which lies only 3.5 km south of Greenhouse Farm and at which several phases of salvage work were undertaken as the site was gradually quarried away early in the last century. On a smaller scale, recent excavations at Blackhorse Lane, Swavesey have found two kilns of a similar date, while another first-century kiln was found in the 1950s at Water Newton.

Following recent study and excavation of the defences, amphitheatre and forum-basilica of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum), challenging questions about the origins, development, decline and eventual abandonment of the Roman city invited fresh excavation of a representative insula. A well known, but nevertheless major deficiency of the Victorian and Edwardian excavations at Silchester is the almost total absence of chronology, either relative or absolute, such that we have little basis on which to determine the development of the city through time. In making the selection of an appropriate area in which to investigate the larger issues, consideration had to be given to a number of criteria: the chosen insula should have reliable evidence for the presence of buildings not recognised in the Society of Antiquaries' excavations of 1890–1909. In this way it would be possible to assess the extent of the loss of stratigraphie information as a result of the earlier excavation. Equally the selected insula should offer the prospect of investigating apparently blank areas which might, with modern methods of area excavation, yield evidence of timber-framed buildings which the early excavators had failed to recognise. Account also had to be taken of a distinctive element of the town plan of Calleva which includes buildings both aligned with the Roman street grid and oriented at a variety of angles askew to the streets in order to ascertain how far they shared a common history.

In the course of the excavations at Silchester in 1907 remains of a Romano-Celtic temple were discovered in Insula XXXV in the south-east quarter of the Roman city (FIGS 1–2). The building, like many others in the town (including two further temples in Insula XXX beneath the present churchyard), was not set square to the street grid, but its main axis was aligned some 13 degrees north-east–south-west from the east–west street.

The first edition of Camden's Britannia in 1586 was the foundation of Roman epigraphy in Britain. In that edition, Camden reported a mere twelve Roman inscriptions on stone (together with one on a lead pig from Wookey Hole), compared with over 110 in the 1607 edition. Of the twelve inscriptions, one was from Silchester, two from Yorkshire, two from Lancashire, and seven from Cumberland.

In my Legionary Recruitment and Veteran Settlement during the Principate, I showed that legionary veterans displayed an increasing tendency to settle at the stations where they had served, rather than return home or move elsewhere, and that such settlement encouraged the development of hereditary service. The army indeed became so dependent on hereditary service that it was eventually made compulsory, probably by Diocletian.

Roman Scotland provides a unique opportunity to examine archaeological sites which represent uncomplicated, often single, phases of activity. Rather than the usual palimpsests seen in the sites in the rest of the island, resulting from centuries of occupation, Scotland has been the archaeological equivalent of a highwater mark, only briefly inundated by the Spring tides of the Roman Empire during the Flavian, Antonine, and Severan periods.

When the fifth edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain was published in March 2001, the distributions of individual classes of site raised questions about the character of Roman Britain. In particular, apparent differences between the response to Rome of the peoples of the South and East and of those of the North and West of Britain were highlighted. These issues are discussed here in the context of the key monument class distributions depicted on the Map.

Small finds in copper alloy with their maker's stamp allow study of their production and distribution — sometimes far flung across all the provinces of the Roman Empire — comparable to potters' stamps on terra sigillata or other pottery. Since stamped finds indicate their provenance from the same workshop and, above all, their production in the same period, it is possible to assess the arrangements for marketing by means of trading connections, the demand for certain goods, and their circulation due to the movements of the Roman army or private individuals. Vessels in copper alloy, brooches, and strigils are well recorded objects in this respect. However, study of small finds other than these is more difficult, as re-use of metals or imitation should also be considered, if scientific or typological methods are to be applied to explore either the components of the alloy or the shape of the implements. Dating too can be deceptive, as is demonstrated by objects which were sometimes in use for decades or even centuries.