OBJECTS OF ROMAN AND PROVINCIAL ROMAN ORIGIN. 277 II. AN INVENTORY OP OBJECTS OP ROMAN AND PROVINCIAL ROMAN ORIGIN POUND ON SITES IN SCOTLAND NOT DEFINITELY ASSOCIATED WITH ROMAN CONSTRUCTIONS. BY JAMES CURLE, LL.D., P.S.A.ScoT., P.S.A. I. INTRODUCTORY. The Roman occupation of Caledonia was never very secure, nor was it of long duration. No towns sprang up under its shelter. The villas and farms common in Southern Britain are ahsent. There are no traces of any buildings beyond those required for the occupation of a military force. The area covered by the Roman operations was considerable in extent, and for a time at least these operations must have pro- foundly affected the country. Tacitus, the chief Roman writer who attempts to present a record of a military campaign in Caledonia, for a moment lifts the curtain on the marches and the battles of Agricola, but though he conveys to us a knowledge of the struggle, as regards details he leaves us little the wiser. The accounts given by Dio and Herodian of the expedition of Severus are little better than romances. Archaeology has done much to supplement the meagre facts which we can glean from literary sources indicating the extent to which Roman civilisation influenced Caledonia. It has gathered information from the excavation of Roman military constructions, the forts which held the Antonine Vallum or the lines of communication, the camps which sheltered the armies on the march. It has brought together the inscriptions and the relics that the troops left behind. The line of the Roman advance from the South, crossing the Cheviots and passing through Newstead, on to Inveresk and the shores of the Forth, is plain. While the exact route taken by the western road through Birrens and by Annandale and Clydesdale past Castledykes to the northern isthmus is less certain, there can be little doubt that it existed. The line of the Antonine Vallum with its forts has been denned. North of the Forth and Clyde the forts and the marching camps have been traced through Perthshire on to Angus and Kincardine, and even as far north as Aberdeenshire. Since 1885, when the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland undertook the excavation of Birrens, fourteen Roman forts have been examined, and planned more or less completely. Sir George Macdonald's studies of the Antonine Vallum have greatly extended our knowledge of its 278 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY, MARCH 14, 1932. construction. The collection of relics has largely increased. We have, as it were, recovered the skeleton of the occupation. It must be admitted, however, that the impression of men living and moving which comes when we find ourselves in touch with their personal belong- ings—arms, tools, or objects of daily use—is too often awanting. Except at Newstead, and perhaps at Bar Hill, where apparently circumstances led to hurried evacuation, the troops have left little behind them. On the other hand, there exists a number of objects, products of Italian or provincial Roman workshops, which have been found in Scotland on sites not definitely associated with Roman constructions, and from these we may glean some knowledge of the course of trade or the repercussions of the Roman invasion. Many such relics are preserved in the National Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh, and the records of finds are scattered through the long series of volumes of the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,1 or in other publications. One purpose of this paper is to compile an inventory of these objects and to facilitate reference to the articles that deal with them. In the inventory which is appended, the occurrence of Roman finds on ninety-six sites in Scotland is recorded.2 Few of these objects came from Italy ; most of them are provincial —products of Gaul, of the Rhineland, or of Britain. They are widely distributed over the country, though, as might be expected, the more important finds come from the area south of the Antonine Vallum, more accessible along the roads leading from the Great Wall, or by shipping. North of the Vallum the finds are most numerous in the eastern counties—at some time or other the scene of military operations. The fact that finds so often occur at no great distance from the coast makes it clear that seaborne traffic played a large part in their dis- tribution. Certain of the relics described may have been found where left behind by Roman troops, but it is evident from the nature of the sites from which they have been recovered that a large proportion had undoubtedly drifted into native hands. In five instances these come from caves, all of them on the coast, and so widely apart as the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, Fife, and Moray. In eight they appear to be associated with lake-dwellings in South-western Scotland. In six they are from earth-houses (underground dwellings), all with one exception in the county of Angus; in twelve from brochs, the stone towers which form so typical an archaeological feature of Northern Scotland, and of the Orkneys and Shetland, and of which a few rare examples have 1 The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland are referred to as Proc. * The numbers in the inventory run from 1 to 92, but four numbers have been duplicated. OBJECTS OF ROMAN AND PROVINCIAL ROMAN ORIGIN. 279 been noted in the Lowlands. In ten the association is with native forts, hilltop sites surrounded by lines of fortification which served as places of defence or villages; in four, with kitchen-middens; in six, with interments. In three instances there is association with objects which are obviously of native origin. Lastly, in forty-two instances the finds were sporadic, unconnected with remains of native objects or con- structions, but even among these there are not a few which occur so far from Roman sites or lines of communication that at the time the objects were concealed or lost they must have been in native keeping. As regards the geographical distribution, fifty-seven of the finds come from the counties south of the Yallum, and thirty-nine from counties north of that line. The details are as follows:— Counties South of the Vallum. Midlothian, 6; West Lothian, 3; East Lothian, 5; Berwick, 4; Rox- burgh, 7; Selkirk, 2; Peebles, 3; Dumfries, 4; Kirkcudbright, 5; Wig- town, 4; Ayr, 6; Lanark, 7; Renfrew, 1. Counties North of the Vallum. Fife, 4; Stirling, 2; Argyll, 3; Perth, 1; Angus, 7; Aberdeen, 3; Moray, 4; Sutherland, 2; Caithness, 4; Orkney, 5; Ross and Cromarty, 1; Inverness, 3. The majority of the entries in the inventory refer to pottery, which is more widely distributed than any other provincial Roman product; next in order of numbers come the bronze vessels, which are not infreqiient, but on the whole the area over which these have been found is less extensive. Glass, too, is noted—generally it is extremely fragmentary, though the fragments are sufficient to indicate the class of vessels which drifted into Caledonia during the Roman period. Iron tools present considerable difficulty. At Newstead such tools as the dolabra were typically Roman; on the other hand, there were others which did not differ materially from those found on native sites. It is quite evident, for example, that the lake-dwellers in Ayrshire were accustomed to tools and were skilled in their use, and their tools may have been made locally from native patterns. The only important finds of iron tools and metal work, however, have been made in the country south of the Antonine Wall, which was more freely permeated by Roman influence than the north. It seems probable that among these finds we have not only the product of the native smith but also imported material, and, therefore, they have been included. 280 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY, MARCH 14, 1932. Brooches are dealt with, though the great majority of these must emanate from native workshops. They are typical products of the time, and, if one may judge from their presence in the forts, they must have come north with the Roman troops, and, indeed, comparatively few of them have been found at any great distance from the occupied area. The inventory also embraces a few miscellaneous objects which do not belong to any of the foregoing categories. It has not been thought necessary to deal in any detail with the silver hoard found at Traprain, as that has been fully treated in Mr A. O. Curie's Treasure of Traprain; nor to include coins, as Sir George Macdonald has already published exhaustive lists of all the coins found in Scotland, whether on Roman or on native sites, that have been brought to his notice.1 In view, however, of their bearing on the chronology of Roman products found, and in order to define the limits of the period during which Roman products were circulating in Caledonia, one or two finds made in recent years call for mention. In the table appended to Sir George Macdonald's first paper he gives a series of Imperial coins found on Roman sites, beginning with Augustus and ending with Commodus. There is no reason to suppose that any of these coins were in circulation in Caledonia before the expedition of Agricola in A.D. 80. We do not know with any certainty when the Agricolan occupation came to an end. • It probably lasted up to the accession of Trajan in A.D. 98, possibly even until well on in that Emperor's reign. But we know that the reoccupation of Caledonia in the reign of Pius, and the erection of the Vallum between the Firths of Forth and Clyde, took place about A.D.