Amphitheatres, although not so ubiquitous as, say, bath-buildings, were common enough in the Roman world to attract a set of terms applicable to their very distinctive structural features. It is true that they varied in construction from a simple earth bank to an elaborate masonry building like the Colosseumat Rome. But certain characteristics were constant, and it seems useful to list the technical terms used to describe amphitheatres. Some of these are scarcely applicable to the relatively simple Chester amphitheatre, while others are etymologically rather dubious. This list itself is almost entirely confined to the structural features since there are easily accessible descriptions of the spectacles which took place within amphitheatres. Previous lists have been given by Dyggve in his description of the amphitheatre at Salona and by Heidenreich in his report on the civil amphitheatre of Colonia Traiana at Xanten.

SummaryExcavations at the Iron Age hillfort of Bigberry, Kent, in 1978–80 had the object of a fresh appraisal since the excavations of 1933–4 of a site customarily regarded as the first obstacle encountered by Caesar after his second landing in Britain in 54 B.C. The main defences and those of the annexe were sectioned, and a hitherto unrecorded cross-dyke also. Various magnetic anomalies located by a geophysical survey were investigated and gave evidence of internal occupation and structures. It is suggested that there was a settlement preceding the hillfort, with the cross-dyke as a possible second phase; the hillfort may have been built in the second century B.C. by newcomers from Gaul, and after Caesar's passage through Kent the occupants moved down into the valley of the Stour to the site of Canterbury, though the precise point in the second half of the first century B.C. remains uncertain.The opportunity has been taken of a simple but complete republication of the nineteenth-century discoveries of the metalwork from the site now dispersed among museums at Canterbury, Maidstone and Manchester. It is suggested that this material represents the abandoned possessions of the inhabitants and varied aspects of their life, and industrial or ritual explanations are discounted.

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Renewed excavation at the Iron Age hillfort of Oldbury, near Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1983 and 1984 was designed to effect a comparison with earlier excavation in 1938 and to relate the hillfort itself to others on the Greensand of Surrey and Kent. Re-examination of the defences suggests construction in the first half of the first century B.C. and questions the supposed refortification against the Roman invasion of A.D. 43; activity at this time and later in the Roman period is thought to reflect quarrying for stone. Some evidence for internal activity was recovered, but the scale was too slight to indicate permanent occupation.

The parish of Riseholme lies immediately north of the Lincoln city boundary and on the east side of Ermine Street as it runs along the top of the Jurassic ridge towards the Humber. It is an area of fertile, easily worked land lying between 130 and 200 ft. above sea-level, and must have presented a sharp contrast, in prehistoric eyes, to the areas of difficult settlement on the low-lying clays to east and west. The latter no doubt came under the plough in Roman times and indeed probably formed the bulk of the territorium attached to the colonia at Lincoln after its foundation at the end of the first century; but the higher ground, with few or no trees to clear, must still have seemed desirable land to the discharged legionary.