Course: Hadrian's Wall: Life on the Roman Frontier

To appreciate the Wall and the people who lived in its shadow, we should place them in time. The diagram below offers a simple timeline of major events in the …

In the next step you will have an opportunity to explore the buried landscape of Roman Maryport through the magnetometry data recovered by Drs Alan Biggins and David Taylor for …

In this step a tombstone from Gallows Hill, Carlisle, at the western end of the Wall, provides a glimpse of a frontier couple. They stand to remind us of the …

Over several years of intense excavations at Vindolanda, Dr Andrew Birley has examined the distribution of finds both within the Severan period fort (the fort used in the early third …

There is much more to archaeology than just digging! We have already seen some of the methods archaeologists use to interpret sites without excavation – for example, we looked at …

Roman forts have fascinated generations of antiquarians and subsequently archaeologists. Whilst these distinctive playing card-shaped buildings and the rich finds within have much to teach us, life also went on …

Surprisingly, we know remarkably little about where the people of the frontier communities were buried. We have no cemeteries associated with the indigenous or native settlements, and we have only …

Hadrian’s Wall was situated within a very rural landscape, and the vast majority of people living in the frontier zone lived on rural settlements and were engaged in farming. But …

‘The most important single factor in the whole of Roman history is quite simply the success of the Roman army’ wrote John Mann in 1974. That army had been called …

What was it like to actually live near a Roman fort? Having looked at the challenge of reconstructing ancient landscapes, we can now focus on the military settlements that characterised …

So how do we know what soldiers looked like? There are a number of sources that provide evidence for the appearance of late Roman soldiers. The arms and armour discovered …

The Notitia Dignitatum is an extraordinary document that survives in a number of manuscript copies from the Middle Ages. This document lists the offices and social ranking of the civil …

The great Roman writer Vergil begins his epic tale, the Aeneid, with the words Arma virumque cano, ‘I sing of arms and the man’. Arms, armour, men and identity were …

Every campaign exposed Roman generals and soldiers to new weapons and equipment, tactics and enemies, and these experiences inspired further evolution of the Roman armies through the 3rd and 4th …

Using original artefacts and models Dr Rob Collins presents items of dress worn by soldiers of the late Roman army in Britain. These finds from Hadrian’s Wall help us to …