Septimius Severus: First Hammer of the Scots

[kilted2000]

Another writer I would look out for is Mary Beard, classics prof at Cambridge. All her books are good and SPQR is a good one to start with. Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars is also very good if you want to go with primary sources.

[OC Richard]

What's cool about some of the more recent books is that they're written by archaeologists who also have a firm grasp of the primary written sources (which for Roman Britain are often extremely sparse).

It's the putting together of the archaeology, the iconography, the epigraphic record, coins, writing tablets, itineraries, maps, and the primary written sources that gets us closer to knowing what happened.

Of course much of the time it's difficult or impossible for us today to line up these various bits of evidence into anything clear, or even coherent. But they're all pieces of the same puzzle and must fit together somehow.