Abstract

Collingwood's attitude toward literary sources is related to the method of selective excavation. But as an excavator, Collingwood came in for some criticism from his fellow archaeologists. Collingwood's treatment of four historical problems is considered: why Caesar invaded Britain, why Augustus did not, how the Claudian conquest proceeded, and why Hadrian built his wall and vallum. Collingwood concluded that Caesar intended to conquer, Augustus did not, and that the vallum served a civil rather than military purpose. In trying to identify past thought Collingwood approaches literary sources and archaeological remains with particular questions in mind. Questions and answers being correlative, this often amounts to having made up his mind in advance. When he comes to the evidence itself, he sees what he expects to see ; occasionally what he sees is not in fact there. Where Collingwood creates a history, Peter Salway sometimes seems to be summarizing a subject. With Collingwood, however, we more than participate in processes of thought, we actually see the connections. Collingwood makes the real rational, and no historian of Roman Britain has done that better