There can be little doubt that down to the beginning of the Early Iron Age the greater part of the Ager Veientanus, in common with the adjoining territories, was still covered by the primeval forest of which the Ciminian Forest of early Roman history was the still-considerable surviving remnant. There were doubtless trails through the forest, and the activities of hunters and charcoal burners would account for sporadic finds of stone implements (in so far as these have been correctly identified as of Neolithic or Bronze Age date). But the main centres of settlement at this early date lay elsewhere, along or near the coast and a few of the larger river valleys. One of these was, inevitably, the Tiber itself; another the river Fiora and the uplands around Lake Bolsena, forming a link between the coast and the middle valley of the Tiber. Outside these clearly defined areas of settlement the prehistoric archaeological record is largely a blank.

A recently published history of naval power and trade in the Mediterranean in the early medieval period provides a reminder of that vital but little-explored change in the balance of maritime power which preceded the Crusades and of the movement which won back for the Christians of the West, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta, threatened the shores of Africa and Albania, and was both a rehearsal and an essential preliminary for the great Drang nach Osten which was to follow. Little is known of the shipping used in these operations or of the tactics employed, but an attempt has been made to investigate the scanty sources for the Norman naval operations in the early stages of their conquest of southern Italy and Sicily, not merely because some of these operations were important in their immediate results, but also as an example of the naval technique of the Latin Christian military commanders in southern Europe. The subject derives additional interest from the spectacle it affords of Vikings finding their sea-legs again after many decades as farmers and cavalrymen in Normandy. It also offers one explanation for the conquest of the considerable area of southern Italy and Sicily by a comparatively small force, and once again demonstrates the eclecticism and adaptability of the Normans.

The first casts of the forms of Pompeian victims of the AD 79 eruption of Mt Vesuvius were successfully achieved under the directorship of Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863. To date, 104 individuals have been cast by restorers and archaeologists during the course of excavation. The methods used to obtain these casts were not well documented. It was always assumed that plaster or lime cement was merely poured into voids which preserved the impression of organic remains buried in the ash that covered the site during the catastrophe. It was also assumed that the undisturbed skeletal remains of victims were encased within the casts. The initial aim of the Pompeii Cast Project was to study these bones to build on and test the results of an earlier study of the large sample of Pompeian human remains that were disarticulated by post-excavation activities. Apart from providing information about the people who did not manage to escape the eruption, the project aimed to challenge previous interpretations of the lives and activities of these victims that were solely based on superficial inspection and circumstantial evidence.

Twenty-six casts were subjected to CT scanning or X-ray analysis in 2015. The results were unexpected. It was clear that the casts had been considerably manipulated. Bones were often removed prior to casting, and other elements had been introduced. This ongoing project has now been expanded to establish how these casts were achieved, to better understand nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeological and restoration practice.

Rome under the Republic, from its beginnings as a small barbarian community, gradually took over the Greek world. It then transformed itself and its subjects into an Empire of remarkable stability and continuity of institutions. Similarly, the Roman Republican coinage, modelled originally on that of the Greek citystates of S. Italy, became under Augustus the coinage of the Empire. It would be interesting to know to what extent, if at all, the Republican mint anticipated or foreshadowed the ultimately very sophisticated organisation of the Imperial mint and its systematic use of control-marks forming part of the coin-type.

Certainly for the Republic the problems caused by the need to produce an enormous bulk of coinage already existed and a number of issues display series of marks which can be regarded as controls. For instance, the issue of L. Iulius Bursio displays such marks and alone used nearly as many obverse dies as the entire Athenian New Style silver coinage. It would be surprising if the process of striking was not in some way systematised and controlled by the marks, as it was in the case of the Athenian coinage.

In 2010, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies achieved its centenary. In 2012, the British School at Rome, which was closely linked to the origins of the Roman Society, celebrates the centenary of its Royal Charter. This marked the formal establishment of the distinctively broad and interdisciplinary remit of the School by the inclusion of humanities, art and architecture in a single institution. The combination of these two anniversaries has given rise to this attempt to think through some of the paths that Roman studies have taken, and to understand them within the context of broader developments in particularly British and Italian historiography. The Roman Society and the British School at Rome have many points of connection, both in terms of individuals and in terms of research interest. Recent work on the development of a British historical tradition has shown that it remains important to ground the reading of historical scholarship within the intellectual trajectory of its practitioners. This is, therefore, an argument about how the research represented in the Journal of Roman Studies, and conducted at the British School at Rome, and ultimately more widely, should be seen in a historiographical context.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2010, but also in the first part of 2011), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.

I 125 anni tra le guerre civili della tarda Repubblica e la fine del periodo Giulio-Claudio testimoniarono un cambiamento drammatico nel personale delle legioni romane: i posti occupati dagli Italiani vennero gradualmente occupati da uomini provenienti dalle province dell'Impero, che quindi provenivano dalle più diverse culture. La prospettiva di lunghi anni di servizio su distanti frontiere aveva alienato le tradizionali fonti di forza lavoro. Questo articolo suggerisce che il cambiamento era in atto prima di quanto fosse generalmente supposto. Pochi Italiani ritornavano a casa dopo il servizio. In genere i legionari non avevano alcun legame emotivo con la città di Roma, al punto che ben pochi avevano mai la possibilità di visitarla.

This paper analyses the manuscripts of Diego de Revillas in the British School at Rome Library regarding the Severan marble plan and its arrangement in the Capitoline Museum, in 1742. They offer some insight into how this much discussed work was undertaken by Giovanni Battista Nolli, under the supervision of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi and Revillas. Specifically, Revillas’ documents throw new light on the way the scale reduction of the Forma Urbis was (incorrectly) figured out.

The epigraphy of Roman North Africa is well known to be richer than that of any other Western province. Not only is the total number of inscriptions large, but their wide distribution makes possible a detailed study of some municipal institutions withoutmuch danger of arguing from evidence from one city to a generalisation covering many. The structure of municipal life in the more populous parts of North Africa was characterised by the large number of communities which, though small, developed genuine civic institutions, as compared with the semi-tribal agglomerations with a few very large cities that we find elsewhere in the Western Empire. Further, many of the sites have been desolate since the end of Roman rule, and no events during that rule brought destruction widespread enough to cause significant gaps in the epigraphy taken as a whole.

In presenting the material that is the subject of this paper, it should be stressed at the outset that this is in no sense a full excavation report. The circumstances of the excavation itself and of its interruption, the subsequent loss or destruction of much both of the material itself and of the records of its discovery, and the death of Professor Ugo Rellini, who conducted a part of the excavation—the combination of all these circumstances means that such a report can never now be written. Nevertheless, the intrinsic interest of the material that survives and the preservation by Dr. Baumgartel of her own excavation notes have seemed to justify a more limited publication; and the main purpose of the present article is to present a type-series of the pottery and of such of the other material as has survived, and at the same time to record something of its stratigraphy and of the observed chronological sequence.

In the pre-Julian Roman calendar there were two cycles of festivals to mark the end of the year, in December and in February, and also residual elements of the decimal scansion of Roman metrology. Together, these elements confirm the traditional hypothesis of a year composed of ten months (the so-called ‘Romulian’ year) prior to that of twelve months (the so-called ‘Numan’ year). The ‘Romulian’ calendar was modified quite considerably during the times of the first Etruscan kings, associated with profound socio-political, and perhaps also metrological, reforms. From then, the two ‘missing’ months in the ‘decimal’ calendar, periods in which work would have been concentrated within the home rather than outside, with the exchange of the surpluses which had been accumulated, were incorporated. The new months were called Mercedonius (?) and Februarius, the latter being the last month of the year. A radical revision of the calendar, which resulted in the last two months becoming the first two, appears to have occurred at the time of the dramatic move to the Republic, as the old festival was too closely related to the figure of the rex. It can be concluded that the archaic calendar of Rome reflects a stratified series of various religious, political and ideological elements evolving over the centuries.

The Cemetery at Sphagion was excavated during the last week of August 1951, under the auspices of the Ashmolean Museum—Sydney University expedition to Cyprus with the aid of funds contributed jointly by the University of Sydney and the Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne, which now possesses the finds allotted to the expedition by the Department of Antiquities. Tomb 17 is in the Cyprus Museum. The University of Sydney has made a generous grant towards the cost of illustration.

The site at Sphagion (so called because of a nearby slaughter-house) lies on the outskirts of the village of Myrtou (Kyrenia District) in North-west Cyprus (fig. 1). It is situated immediately to the North of the main Myrtou-Nicosia road, within a few metres of the 20-mile post from Nicosia. The narrow, flat tract of land, now used for the cultivation of vines and olives, has a shallow surface soil overlying the soft white limestone into which the graves were cut. The land belongs to Eleni Hadji Sophokli of the village of Myrtou.

According to Mommsen the various laws de repetundis, from, the Lex Acilia of the Gracchan period to the Lex Iulia of 59 B.C., never attached any heavier political penalty to the offence than infamia, with consequent exclusion from the Senate, and the exile of those condemned for extortion was solely due to the difficulty of repayment. Mommsen also held that the penalty of twofold restitution introduced by the Lex Acilia was abandoned by the Sullan Lex Cornelia in favour of the simple repayment established by the original Lex Calpurnia of 149 B.C. Only during the Julio-Claudian principate and later were severe penalties in the form of relegatio and exilium inflicted in special circumstances (extra ordinem) by the authority of the senatorial court and not by any remodelling of the Lex Iulia, which continued to inflict only the lesser penalties.

This general doctrine has caused considerable uneasiness for three reasons. First, there is an apparent contradiction between Mommsen's view and two statements of Cicero, which assert that the penalties for extortion were increased in severity by successive laws. Second, Cicero constantly speaks in cases of extortion, whether as prosecutor or in defence, as though the caput of the accused were at stake.