Sublime

At Congresbury, close to the opposite shore in Somerset, archaeology has revealed a re-occupation of the Iron Age hillfort by people who were able, like their counterparts at Dinas Powys, to import fine luxury goods from the eastern Mediterranean at a time when Britannia had fallen off Rome’s own radar.

Yeavering Bell itself has not been substantially excavated but at another great hillfort of the Votadini, Traprain Law in East Lothian, successive archaeological campaigns have revealed a substantial reinforcing of the ramparts at the end of the fourth century and yielded a colossal hoard of fifth-century Roman silver weighing 53 lb. Most of the pi

Walking this gnarled shore one summer afternoon, I blundered upon a matrix of faint stone rectangles embedded in the tundra: vestiges of the monks’ ancient dwellings, hundreds of years older, even, than the Anasazi ruins in Davis Gulch.

The displaced tribes—from the easterners like the Chickasaws and Delawares to the more local Wichitas and Osages—continued to be resettled in our hunting grounds.

As barbarians by definition, their traders may have been forced to queue at the entrance to the empire. Intriguing concentrations of finds from the Northumberland village of Great Whittington, just a mile or so north of the Wall, suggest that here was a sort of caravanserai where drovers, traders, petitioners, embassies and wannabe citizens had to