The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) is a project run by the British Museum which encourages the voluntary reporting of archaeological artefacts discovered by members of the public in England and Wales, particularly metal detector users. Finds are recorded onto a database (available at www.finds.org.uk), and this resource now holds records for over 800,000 archaeological objects, a figure which increases on a daily basis. Since its establishment in 1997, it has become a key resource for archaeological researchers. Around 40 per cent of the artefacts recorded on the database are of Roman date, and the principal aim of this book is to assess the contribution that this resource can make to our understanding of Roman Britain. Bringing together vast quantities of seemingly random finds scattered across the English and Welsh countryside, Tom Brindle brings order to this data by showing how it can be used to indicate the presence of 240 previously unknown Roman sites. These sites are presented within a series of regional case studies which discuss important new sites as well as statistics that contribute significantly to the understanding of the density of settlement in rural Roman Britain.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at TRAC 2014, as well as some invited contributions. In keeping with the aims of TRAC, several papers make make innovative use of interdisciplinary theory: in humanistic geography, philosophy and archaeology; social psychology; and the cognitive science of religion in the study of Roman monuments, military social history and religion. Other papers share a common theme: the critical interpretation of archaeological evidence. A more careful consideration of non-grave good pottery sherds from graves suggests that these often disregarded items potentially shed light on funerary rites which are usually considered to be invisible; the potential importance of plant remains, particularly of exotic and rare species, in ritual deposits is examined and a new perspective on the negative aspects of Roman conquest of Northern Gaul presented. New approaches towards our understanding of space and landscape in the Roman world comprise an examination of the suburbs of ancient Rome and preliminary results of an ongoing project exploring the relationship between wetland landscapes and domestic settlements, presenting a case study from Spain.