Sad to hear of the death of Colin Wells. It is hard to estimate how groundbreaking and inspirational his work on Augustan Germany was. Obituary in the Times:
Colin Wells was a distinguished classicist, archaeologist and historian. Over a career of 45 years he wrote or edited four books and more than 120 articles and reviews on the Roman frontier and army, the social and economic history of the empire, Ancient Carthage and the African provinces.
The work for which Wells will be most remembered is The German Policy of Augustus: an Examination of the Archaeological Evidence (1972). A review in the Journal of Roman Studies (LXIV 1974: 256) captured its fundamental and lasting importance in the opening sentence. “This book is an authoritative study of Augustan military activity in Germany and the archaeological evidence for it, by a scholar who must certainly know more about his subject than any save those actually engaged on the recovery of the primary archaeological material in the Rhineland, Switzerland and Bavaria.”
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