The city is widely regarded as the most characteristic expression of the social, cultural and economic formations of the Roman Empire. This was especially true in the Latin-speaking West, where urbanism was much less deeply ingrained than in the Greek-speaking East but where networks of cities grew up during the centuries following conquest and occupation. This up-to-date and well-illustrated synthesis provides students and specialists with an overview of the development of the city in Italy, Gaul, Britain, Germany, Spain and North Africa, whether their interests lie in ancient history, Roman archaeology or the wider history of urbanism. It accounts not only for the city's geographical and temporal spread and its associated monuments (such as amphitheatres and baths), but also for its importance to the rulers of the Empire as well as the provincials and locals.

This article reviews the changes in the archaeological record produced by the ‘ending(s)’ of Roman political, military, and economic systems in Britain along with the related collapse in the cultural systems which materialized in the archaeology. It theorizes the archaeological record for the mid to later fifth century using the modern category of ‘failed/collapsed state’ model. The implications of this for the incoming Germanic peoples and the ways in which they and the Britons constructed their identities are presented. The recent re-examination of the material culture of ‘final-phase’ Roman Britain suggests that settlements, structures, burials, and artefacts of the Romano-British sequence continued in use through the first third of the fifth century. In the longer term, such models were able to establish dominance over the competing war-bands of the core areas of the old Britannia, probably absorbing many of them as these replaced their ‘British’ identity with an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ one.

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The report is focused on excavations in a suite of four rooms in the villa dating to the late third or early fourth century, associated with a plunge-pool excavated in the nineteenth century; the excavations were undertaken in advance of consolidation work. The rooms overlay a second- century bath-house also known from earlier work. The most important find was a hoard of fourth-century counterfeit coins which had been deposited in one of the rooms after it had gone out of use.