It is commonly argued that the proliferation of urban writing known as linguistic landscapes represents “a thoroughly contemporary global trend” (Coupland, 2010: 78). The purpose of this paper is to show that linguistic landscapes are by no means modern phenomena and to draw on our shared interest in multilingual empires to highlight the importance of diachronic inquiry and productive dialog between sociolinguists of modern and ancient societies. We will argue that while signs do operate in aggregate, the common focus on all signsat a single point in time on one streetis problematic because the interpretation of signs is diachronic in nature, intrinsically linked to the preceding signs in the same environment and to related signs elsewhere, and the process of reading “back from signs to practices to people” (Blommaert, 2013: 51) is not as unproblematic as it is sometimes made to look.

The frontier between Gubbio (ancient Umbria) and Perugia (ancient Etruria), in the northeast part of the modern region of Umbria, was founded in the late sixth centurybc. The frontier endured in different forms, most notably in the late antique and medieval periods, as well as fleetingly in 1944, and is fossilized today in the local government boundaries. Archaeological, documentary and philological evidence are brought together to investigate different scales of time that vary from millennia to single days in the representation of a frontier that captured a watershed of geological origins. The foundation of the frontier appears to have been a product of the active agency of the Etruscans, who projected new settlements across the Tiber in the course of the sixth centurybc, protected at the outer limit of their territory by the naturally defended farmstead of Col di Marzo. The immediate environs of the ancient abbey of Montelabate have been studied intensively by targeted, systematic and geophysical survey in conjunction with excavation, work that is still in progress. An overview of the development of the frontier is presented here, employing the data currently available.

Based on a new online database of Celtic personal names, this research demonstrates how the study of Romano-British onomastics can shed light on the complexities of linguistic and cultural contacts, complementing archaeological material and literary sources. After an introductory section on methodology, Part One analyses naming formulae and expressions of filiation as evidence for both continuity and change dependent on social and geographical factors. Confusion and contamination between the Latin and Celtic systems proved much less common than on the Continent, where earlier contact with Roman culture and the written tradition for Continental Celtic occasionally facilitated an unusual form of syncretism. Part Two examines the naming formulae attested at Roman Bath and the mechanisms by which Celts adopted Latin names. The case-study of Bath relates continuity and change in both naming formulae and nomenclature to an acceptance of, or resistance to, ‘Romanization’ in Britain.