with destruction. Notable early examples of this type of work were the excavations prior to the construction of the Colchester by-pass in 1930–1935, which provided the context for c.f.c. hawkes and M.R. Hull’s classic investigation of the late–Iron Age oppidum (fortified town) at Camulodunum. Such rescue work set the stage for the latter part of the century.

The systematization of knowledge in this period allowed the first authoritative modern historical account of the Roman Britain to be written by R.G. Collingwood, whose work Roman Britain and the English Settlements in the Oxford History of England series appeared in 1936. Although some of the details of this volume have been heavily criticized, its creative style and its general form, combining as it does historical narrative with thematic treatments of cultural history, have been emulated ever since. Collingwood was Waynfleet Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, and his clear-thinking approach certainly set much of the agenda for Roman British studies for over half a century. He was also influential in the process of systematically cataloging all the Roman inscriptions from Britain. His Roman Inscriptions of Britain (continued after his death by others) has been fundamental for subsequent research.

The model of compiling authoritative corpora, or extended works, was emulated in other spheres during the second half of the twentieth century. A.R. Birley brought into print The Fasti of Roman Britain (1981), a valuable compilation of information about individuals known from historical and epigraphic sources that had been begun by his father, Eric Birley. A.L.F. Rivet and C. Smith published The Place-names of Roman Britain in 1979, and information on sculptural material is still being published in the British volumes of the Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani series, the first volume of which appeared in 1977. In addition to these texts has been the publication of two authoritative maps of Roman Britain produced by the Ordnance Survey in 1956 and 1978. With the appearance of these works of reference, the systematic study of Roman Britain has become much more soundly based. In the period after World War II there was a major shift in the character of the excavations. The destruction of major urban sites caused by the wartime bombing meant that the limited resources for excavation were directed mostly toward the examination of these partially destroyed town centers. The major Roman settlements that were consequently the subject of excavation were London (including Southwark), Canterbury, and Exeter.

In London, W.F. Grimes’s relatively small-scale work provided vital new evidence that formed the basis of a new understanding of the development of the city. His spectacular discovery of the remains of the Temple of Mithras in 1954 also brought the destruction of archaeological sites by redevelopment to the attention of the public for the first time. In Canterbury, S.S. Frere developed the skill of deep stratigraphic excavation under difficult circumstances. However, it was his subsequent excavations in the 1950s and 1960s at Verulamium that transformed the understanding of Romano-British towns. For the first time, the careful analysis of a major urban site was combined with an intellectual rigor to provide a detailed account of the early development of a town. Elsewhere, the threat of development led to a wide range of excavations on an increasing diversity of sites. However, resources and excavators’ energies were not always put into postexcavation work, with the result that few of the major rescue projects of the 1950s and 1960s were fully published.

Nevertheless, there was an energy behind much of the archaeological work in the 1960s as witnessed by the range of published archaeological conferences and more general works of synthesis. Outstanding among these was S.S. Frere’s Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, first published in 1967. This book drew on the full range of historical, epigraphic, and archaeological sources to produce a firmly argued account of the history and development of the province. Frere’s work exemplifies the culmination of the tradition of using archaeological sources to write a narrative history of Roman Britain. Although innumerable others have followed this model, no other work has the same stature. Frere was also instrumental in founding the journal Britannia, a journal devoted to the study of Roman Britain that first appeared in 1970.