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The Roman town of Forum Novum lies in the Sabine hills to the northeast of Rome. Its study forms part of the British School at Rome's Tiber Valley Project, a collaborative research initiative which studies the Tiber valley as the hinterland of Rome, tracing the impact of Rome's development on the history of its settlement, economy, and cultural identity from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1300 (Patterson and Millett 1999; Patterson et al. 2000) (fig. 1). The project draws on the extensive work carried out in this area to produce a new, material-based history of the valley. While the project seeks to re-evaluate past survey material, a vital contrast is provided by the development of new field projects to fill the gaps in settlement knowledge. Three main lacunae have been identified: the study of urban centres; the dearth of data from the E bank of the Tiber; and the poor understanding of the late-antique and early Mediaeval landscape. Forum Novum offers an opportunity to address all these lacunae.Urbanism forms a key research theme for the Tiber Valley Project. In marked contrast to the intensity of archaeological work on rural settlement in this area, there has been little systematic research on towns. Study has tended to concentrate on the excavation of monumental structures or, more rarely, the investigation of single and exceptional towns such as Ostia and Rome itself. Surprisingly little is known of the organization of the smaller towns and knowledge of their history is based largely on the epigraphic and documentary evidence.

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Thehillfort of BuryWallsin Shropshirehasbeen surveyedextensivelyby topographicalandgeophysical methods with the aims of recovering evidence for occupation, characterising the use of the hill fort and clarifying the chronological development of the site.Topographic surveys delineated the current extent ofthefort anditsmassivefortifications.Resistance surveysshowedseveralinterestingfeatures insidethefort, includingextensiveuse ofthegeology tomakeflattenedledgesinanotherwise quiteuneven fort interior, a possible cross dyke, interior roads and traces of possible dwellings.Magnetic gradient surveys again showed clearly the possible cross dyke. Additional geophysical surveys attempted to define the depths of these features found in the resistance and magnetic gradient maps. This study, althoughnot fullyanswering the originalaims, provides ausefulbasisfor future excavation.

Five geophysical survey techniqueswere used toinvestigate the infilled section of the outerditch at the Iron Age hill fort of Bury Walls, Shropshire.The techniques were resistance mapping and four profiling methods: resistivity sounding, ground-penetratingradar (GPR),P-wave seismic refraction and S-wave seismic refraction.The ditchwas clearly visible ontheresistance mapand on GPRprofiles, but no depth estimate was obtainable from these surveys.The most successful survey technique was S-wave seismic refraction, both for determining whether the ditch was present on a profile and for obtaining an estimate of its depth. A key factor for the success of S-wave seismic refraction profiling was that the ditch had been excavatedinto the sandstone bedrock