ABSTRACT
The sources for the history of a Roman province may give an abundant flow of information for a particular series of problems, but for many other questions they may supply hardly any answers or be completely silent. This of course applies to the history of the Roman province of Noricum. Less progress has been made in establishing the military history of Noricum and in the investigation of its limes than in the frontier provinces that border it. Hence any attempted portrayal of the history of Noricum must depict to some extent a mere torso, its appearance truncated by the meagreness of the sources and by the limitations of modern research. The names of peoples and communities, and the names of places, rivers and streams, mountains, fields and sections of the countryside, preserved partly in ancient literary sources and in inscriptions, and partly in medieval or modern geographical names, are less suited to historical investigation.
