Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (120 page)

Roman writer who lived in the late second and early 3rd centuries
ad
. He refers to events in Britain from the conquest of ad 43 onwards, but his often lively narrative is not always considered entirely reliable except when he is writing about his own times.

 
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Leader of the native resistance to Caesar's second invasion of Britain in 54 bc. He was probably the king of the Catuvellauni, and perhaps a forebear of Tasciovanus and Cunobelinus.

 
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A form of stratification in which an individual's social position is fixed at birth and cannot be changed. There is virtually no intermarriage between the members of different caste groups.

 
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A Latin term for a water cistern fed by an aqueduct and in turn feeding a network of distribution pipes.

 
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The process whereby objects are made from a thermo-setting molten material poured into a former or mould of some kind. In metalworking, casting usually involves the use of a sand, clay, or stone mould into which molten metal is poured to produce an object. Some care has to be taken, however, because metal melted over a fire absorbs gases from the combustion of the fuel and any moulds used thus have to be designed to ensure that bubbles of gas are not trapped to spoil the casting.

 
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A thin irregular ridge of metal on the outer face of a casting, resulting from seepage of the molten metal into the joint between the separate components of the mould used in its manufacture. A casting jet is similar but is a small plug of metal that originally filled the gate or aperture used to fill the mould. During the final cleaning and finishing of a cast object the jet and flash are usually knocked off and filed smooth.

 
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