Welcome to Britannica
This site is the modest beginning of what I hope will become a useful tool for finding
what has been written about the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain. It began as a
simple database of bibliographical material I had collected to aid my own further study
but now seems to have a life of its own. It might in fact be better presented as a
database, but as an inveterate browser, the information appears here as I
should like to find it. Once I'm a little more organized I shall put the whole site and
the underlying database on-line for download as standard zip files.
Some of the pages are quite long, (there will eventually be around three thousand
references), but I have resisted the temptation to include navigation links in the body of
the listings. Navigation links are present at the top and bottom of every page and can
easily be reached with the Ctrl + Home and Ctrl+End keys on your keyboard. The Site
Map lists, - and links, to every page on the site and gives a summary of the content of
each page.
I am also working on a series of maps and a gazetteer of Roman sites in Britain to enhance
what is a pretty boring site, but if visual stuff is what you need there already exist
several entertaining Roman sites on the web, with Bill Thayer's site probably the best
starting point.
The site is split into three main areas - viz..
1 Roman Britain - History and General Surveys, Site Archaeology
(excavation reports etc.) and Detail (observations on social conditions, industry,
settlement etc.). Archaeology will grow to become the largest section and in the future I
intend to include maps and a site gazetteer.
2 Background - no more than a select list of works for background
reading, - and only those in English I'm afraid. Serious students of the Roman
Empire and Civilization really do need three other modern languages !! - although most of
the relevant Latin texts can be found in translation - many here on the web.
3 General Information - which includes a list of abbreviations used in
the other sections and links to other sources as well as booksellers and publishers etc.
Any suggestions that would make the site more useful will be very welcome, -
particularly contributions of recent references from local archaeology society journals.
(A round trip of four hours to my nearest useful library is something of an impediment to
my digging out this information.) If by chance you are the secretary or
publicity officer of a local archaeological society I should be very grateful to receive
details of articles from your journals, serial publications or monographs,
that have a place here. There will inevitably be some errors in the listings and if
you can find the time to let me know of these, it would be a great help.
I take the opportunity to acknowledge here my debt to all those authors, serial
publications, learned journals, library catalogues, web sites and mailings lists etc.
whose pages and archives I have scanned and sifted to compile this bibliography - I hope
they will forgive my rank plagiarism and that the means are indulgently judged to justify
the end.
Eric Howgate |
