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Near the conclusion of the Third Report, which summarized the work on 710 specimens, the authors stated that it was ‘likely to be the last major report of the South-Western Sub-Committee’, and so it seemed at the time. During the 10 years that have elapsed since then, another 490 specimens have been examined, from the following counties and museums or collections:This report therefore extends the list of specimens examined by this Committee from 710 to 1200, and it is believed that this really is the last major report of this body.

The character of early medieval medical manuscripts makes it difficult to generalize about the nature of medical knowledge in this period. In order to reconstitute one field of medical science, namely diagnosis and prognosis, while avoiding the pitfalls of unjustified generalization, this essay limits itself to reconstructing the understanding of pulse and urine inspection available in a particular place and time: the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino at the end of the first millennium. The available texts reveal little about the rationale behind these bedside techniques; indeed, pulse and urine seem to be signs without any semiotics, any underlying theory. The clue to this paradox is the fact that these texts see pulse and urine as primarily prognostic rather than diagnostic. Prognosis was understood to be analogous to forms of intuition, judgement, revelation, and prophecy that operated outside the logic of causality. Hence a fully rationalized semiotics was not regarded as necessary for effective medical practice.

SummaryThe site was first occupied in the Bronze Age by a small agricultural settlement, consisting of two circular timber houses with ancillary structures and ditches. One house was eventually replaced by a stone structure. A single radiocarbon determination suggests that the settlement is to be dated within the period 1700–1300 B.C. The Iron Age settlement of Trevisker Round was probably established in the second century B.C., if not earlier. An original inner enclosure, half an acre in area, housing a single defended farmstead, was later superseded by a larger defended enclosure, 3 acres in area, also with circular timber houses and occupation areas. This occupation was followed at the end of the first century A.D., by a Romano-British phase of occupation, which lasted until the middle of the second century.

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