ABSTRACT
The southern tribes of Late Iron Age Britain may have started to receive supplies of Italian wine in amphorae as early as the second half of the 2nd century BC. This might have started off in a very small way with a trickle of infrequent supplies, for this trade or exchange appears to have been slight compared with the numbers of similar wine amphorae found in Gaul at this time. At the beginning of this trade there seems to have been a broad chronological division between the south of the country where Dressel 1A are more commonly found and the eastern counties north of the Thames where finds of Dressel 1B are more normal. This regional trade division is also reflected later around the turn of the 1st century BC at Hengistbury Head and Cleaval Point on the south coast where Dressel 1Pascual 1 from Catalonia is found in some numbers while Italian Dressel 2-4, fairly common at this time north of the Thames, is comparatively rare. However, shortly after this date the normal container for Baetican olive-oil, Dressel 20, probably started arriving, together with some Spanish Dressel 7-11 fish sauce amphorae, and as far as one can tell was fairly evenly distributed both north and south of the Thames. The quantitative figures for Dressel 20 on a variety of sites clearly show that before the Roman conquest supplies of Spanish olive-oil were arriving in Britain as though the country (or at least the southern part of it) was already part of the Empire.
