of Scotland contains a list compiled in 180 by Dr. J. A. Smith.[1] Thirty-one coins are there enumerated more or less specifically. Twenty-three of these belong to very nearly the same period as those unearthed in the excavations the earliest are consular denarii, while all the more important reigns from Nero to Pius are represented. This is just what we should expect. Dr. Smith, however, goes on to mention a coin of Victorinus, followed by coins of Diocletian, Carausius, Galerius Maximianus and Constantine. Nothing that was turned up during our five years' digging gave any support to the view that there had been an occupation in the third century or later. No coin of that period was found. The characteristic fibulae and the pottery were both awanting. Dr. Smith does not say exactly where any of these late coins were discovered. It is evident that he saw them, but the proof that they were actually found in or near the fort is lacking. It is possible that they had been picked up on the site or in its immediate neighbourhood, and that they came there long after the abandonment of the fort. On the rising ground south of the village of Newstead earth-houses have been discovered, and into the doorway of one of these there was built a characteristic piece of Roman moulding.[2] Roman Stone work was also noted in one of these constructions at Crichton Mains in Midlothian,[3] showing that they belong to a post-Roman period, but that period cannot be a very late one, as elsewhere in Scotland their contents have included pieces of vessels of Terra Sigillata.[4] The discovery of an earth-house at Newstead, then, points to native occupation in the neighbourhood of the fort at no long period after the final abandonment; and, in view of the whole results of the excavation, it would appear safest to assume that Dr. Smith's late coins should be connected, not with a subsequent Roman occupation, but with a traffic which, after the period of withdrawal, had gradually been resumed between the Romanised portion of Britain and the people who dwelt to the north of the English wall.
The latest date to which the occupation of the fort by Roman troops could be assigned is the campaign of Severus, A.D. 208 to 210. Severus, however, has, so far as we know, left no clear trace of his presence behind him in Scotland, and we have no definite evidence of his having been at Newstead. The permanent occupation must certainly have ended earlier,
1 Vol. i. pp. 33–38; also vol. v. pp. 105, 108, 362.
2 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. i. pp. 213, 217.
3 Ibid. vol. viii. p. 105.
4 Ibid. vol. viii. p. 25.
342