yearly “pilgrimages” to the wall, and subsequently published his synthesis of research, The Roman Wall (1851). Later editions of this work, published as The Handbook to the Roman Wall, remain a main source for the study of that frontier.

The culmination of this phase in the exploration of Roman Britain consisted of several excavations that sought to provide information about sites on a hitherto unimagined scale. Best known of these projects was that undertaken under the aegis of the Society of Antiquaries of London on the Roman town at Silchester in Hampshire between 1890 and 1910. Here the whole of the area within the Roman walls was trenched, and a sequence of annual reports, published in Archaeologia, provided an unparalleled view of the plan of a whole Romano-British town. Although in retrospect the quality of the excavations can be seen to have been poor, Silchester remains one of only a handful of towns in the Roman Empire for which we have a clear idea of the entire plan. Similar major campaigns of excavations looked at the Roman towns at Caerwent in South Wales (1899–1913) and Wroxeter, Shropshire (1912–1914), while work at Corbridge, Northumberland (1906–1 914), examined a substantial part of a military town in the hinterland of Hadrian’s Wall.

This upsurge in interest produced an enormous amount of evidence, but the potential for addressing broad historical questions was limited by the rather fragmentary nature of the work and the scattered publications. The first real steps toward synthesis came in the work of Francis Haverfield (1860–1919). Based at Oxford, where he was appointed to the Camden Chair of Ancient History in 1907, he worked very much in the German tradition, that of his mentor Theodor Mommsen. With enormous energy, Haverfield set about the process of drawing together the evidence from Roman Britain and attempting to make sense of it.

He first became an editor of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum in 1888, publishing the addenda to Volume 7 on Britain in 1892. Haverfield also provided the descriptions of the Roman antiquities for the early volumes of the Victoria County History, published to celebrate the reign of Queen Victoria. In this way, he developed an unparalleled knowledge of the details of local evidence, and that knowledge was complemented by his broader understanding of the Roman Empire. His reflections on the development of the province were first published in a lecture to the British Academy in 1905, which appeared in that body’s Proceedings in 1906 and subsequently as a book, The Romanization of Roman Britain (1912), which went through a series of editions. This work was supplemented by his Ford lectures, The Roman Occupation of Britain, which were eventually published in 1924. The enduring value of these works was to provide a clear framework for interpreting the material evidence of archaeology in relation to the broader structure of the Roman Empire, a framework that remained influential for well over fifty years. Haverfield was also one of those responsible for founding the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies in 1910, an organization that has continued to take a lead in the subject ever since.

After World War I, the traditions of large-scale site clearance that had epitomized the Edwardian era continued, but with a reduced momentum. The major campaign at Richborough (1922–1938) exemplifies this trend. The period also saw the emergence of two other types of excavation. First, there was a series of much more focused campaigns of research. Some, such as those undertaken by sir mortimer wheeler and his wife, Tessa Wheeler, at sites in Wales and then Verulamium (1930–1934), were designed to pay new attention to the detail of stratigraphy and dating and were undertaken with the firm idea of writing new history. By contrast, the scale of work undertaken by scholars investigating the history of Hadrian’s Wall was much more modest but designed to elucidate the history of the frontier through careful excavations. At Durham University, F. Gerald Simpson and, later, Eric Birley and Ian Richmond were key members of this group. Their excavations and studies of the inscriptions from the wall led to the development of a specialized and focused study of the frontier in particular and the Roman army in general.

By contrast, development pressures also led to the exploration of sites that were threatened