4 Lucerna 57 A Corpus of Gaming Boards from Roman Britain Summer L. Courts and Timothy M. Penn Introduction The enjoyment of leisure time is an important part of the human experience. While much scholarly efort has been applied to investigating top-down entertainment types embodied by amphitheatre games or races in the circus, board gaming, a potential bottom-up, do-it-yourself kind of leisure activity, has received comparatively little attention. Past work has made important progress in reconstructing the rules of ancient games (Austin 1934, 1935; Murray 1951; Bell 1979; Schädler 1994, 1995; Parlett 1999); examining the transmission of diferent kinds of games within the Roman world (Schädler 2007; Hall & Forsyth 2011); elucidating the connections between gaming, gambling and literacy (Purcell 1995; Harlow 2019); and investigating the phenomenological experience of playing ancient games, especially those involving the use of dice (Swif 2017, 123-148). This existing research has provided a frm understanding of many aspects of gaming in the Roman world, though as this contribution will show, there is considerable room for further work. A common assumption running through many of the studies just outlined has been that gaming is characteristic of urban contexts where surplus currency and time allowed for gambling, a view which draws substantial support, at least in Italy, from textual sources (reviewed by Purcell 1995; Toner 1995, 94-95, and followed, for example, by Swif 2017, 127). Archaeological evidence in the form of gaming boards in the Roman Forum; the forum of Timgad in North Africa; the town of Italica, Spain; the public spaces of Sagalassos in Asia Minor; and the portable games found at the fort at Abu Sha’ar, Egypt (Triflo 2011; Boeswillwald et al. 1905, 19– 21, 27–32; Bendala Galán 1973; Lavan 2008, 206–207, 209; Mulvin & Sidebotham 2004) and gaming pieces excavated at Pompeii, Tarantum and elsewhere (Cool 2016) seems to support this interpretation. Less work has been done to investigate whether this assumption holds true elsewhere in the Roman Empire. Work by the Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project does seem to confrm that evidence for recreational gaming activities, including but not restricted to dice, dice shakers, gaming pieces and gaming boards, are relatively common across rural Romano-British sites. Indeed, relevant fnds appear primarily in nucleated settlements and vici, but also in high status graves, industrial centres, villas and farmsteads. A brief discussion of the data published by this project maintains the common view that urbanized sites and sites with close ties to the army were the most likely to engage in gaming and gambling, stating that “most of the rural population were not spending any leisure time that they may have had playing games like XII Scripta or latrones” (Smith et al. 2018, 68). As this statement was made without any urban or military data being collected for comparison, it remains to be established whether the relative lack of evidence for leisure of this kind in the countryside is sufcient to justify the interpretation of such pursuits as “urban” in nature in Britain. While scholars working on literary evidence for social attitudes to gaming do acknowledge the potential for military connotations, their Italo-centric focus similarly means that the wider implications of the connections between soldiers and games have not been explored in detail (Toner 1995, 90; Purcell 1995, 4). However, work by Jilek and Breeze has highlighted the connection between gaming and military sites on the basis of a limited selection of excavated minor fortifcations in Britain and Germany ( Jilek & Breeze 2007). Generally speaking, experts seem unaware of the extent of the evidence for gaming in Britain; most discussion centres on a few famous and important fnds, such as a well-preserved duodecim scriptorum board from Castle Lyons, and one recent grey literature report talked of “only 20 or so Roman gaming sets found in Britain” (T. Allen et al. 2012). In fairness to the authors of this report, the number of known gaming sets including gaming pieces and dice is probably considerably smaller, but we still believe that it is a fair illustration of the general scholarly perception, even among specialists. The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain Project similarly reported 14 rural gaming boards (M. Allen et al. 2018). To address these gaps in current research, we have decided to assemble a corpus of all known gaming boards in Roman Britain, paying careful attention to the types of game played and the kinds of sites with which these artefacts have been associated. The current paper does not allow for an in-depth discussion of gambling, though it seems likely that at least some of the games played on the boards presented below would have allowed participants to play for stakes. For the rest of this contribution, we will present some brief preliminary results of our fndings, as the fnal identifcations of some boards, particularly at Vindolanda and Richborough, await site visits with the curatorial staf who have already been extremely generous and accommodating to our needs. We begin by ofering a brief explanation of our data gathering methodology, before exploring the kinds of games represented, and interrogating the fndspots of gaming boards for the insights they can provide into the practices of bottom-up leisure in Roman Britain. Chronological considerations will not be treated in detail here partly because the published data are frequently not of sufcient quality to support such an undertaking and because this topic has recently been treated in detail by other scholars (see Hall & Forsyth 2011). We fnish by presenting a short appendix detailing the boards of which we are currently aware; if any Lucerna readers know of other relevant fnds which we do not list, we would be delighted to hear from you. We would like to stress throughout that these fgures remain provisional until it has been possible to undertake the necessary visits to museum collections, and we shall seek to avoid quantitative analysis until such a time, but we hope that our work to date will nevertheless provide some exciting new conclusions.