A festschrift can be a curate's egg of a volume; often with a few good papers, padded out with the less good and frequently lacking coherence. It is therefore a pleasure to congratulate the editors at the outset for not producing such a book. This, by contrast, is an interesting and well-structured volume that deserves to be on the shelves of anyone interested in Roman Britain.
Its coherence is much helped by the papers addressing some of the topics highlighted in the London Frameworks documents. For those who work outside English archaeology it will be helpful to note that Frameworks are an English Heritage-funded series of regional projects which have effectively conducted an audit of the state of current archaeological knowledge. They outline what we know, what we would like to know, and how to get there. Here the papers are grouped into four sections: Development — Chronology and Cartography; Landscape, Environment and Hinterland; This World and Beyond: Mind and Spirit; and Living in the Material World. Each section has its own introduction written by one of the editors setting out how the papers fit into the various Frameworks themes.
The first section has essays on Stukeley's maps of London (Clark), the changing nature of how the discoveries have been illustrated (Sloane), changing street plans (Rowsome), population numbers (Swain and Williams), the nature of London (Reece), London in the fifth and sixth centuries (Cowie), and the re-fortification of London and the nature of Saxon Southwark (Tony Brown). Fulford also conducts a wide-ranging review of what happens to public buildings in the south-east that brings out an interesting west/east split.
In the second section Sidell reviews the environmental evidence from exotic imports to dropping river levels and their implications for London as a port. Tyers brings us up to date on the tree-ring evidence, almost a tenfold increase on what was known in 1983, while Cowan and Hinton present the evidence for gardens. There are also five papers concentrating on the hinterland: the Colchester road (Gary Brown), Enfield (Dearne), Shadwell (Bird), Westminster (Thomas), and Grim's Dyke (Bowlt).
The third section starts with a useful drawing together of evidence for education in Roman London and more widely in Britain by Hassall. A pair of papers review religious sites (Merrifield and Hall on the Walbrook; Haynes on mystery religions). Bird looks at the cult of Hercules, while Grew takes the dedication to Mars Camulus, reviewing who this god was and showing the regionality of dedications to gods linked with Mars. Finally there are two re-appraisals of published graves from Southwark. Cotton re-unites the various goods of an important first-century burial and Bateman revisits the female gladiator's bustum to explore what images of gladiators meant to the Roman viewer.
The fourth section opens with an extremely important methodological paper by Plouviez developing a way of comparing brooch assemblages which brings out the regionality they demonstrate. Her solution is a very elegant use of bar charts, not a phrase I ever thought I would find myself writing. Monteil discusses samian inkwells and uses them to cast doubts on any early military presence in Southwark. Raynor and Seeley update the Southwark pottery type series. There are also papers on healthcare (Jackson), bathing (Wardle), small toilet implements (Crummy with Pohl), intaglios (Henig), and the incidence of luxury first-century colourless glass (Shepherd). These all include very useful gazetteers of material, much of it unpublished.
There is much to engage with critically in the volume, though space precludes doing full justice to it here. Of particular interest to this reviewer was the use of material culture to explore major questions about London. Some, such as the early military activity in Southwark, have often been debated, but Crummy's paper opens up interesting new vistas with her mapping of people with a military/Continental identity to the west and a Romano-British one to the east. The data presented in Wardle's paper can be used as a starting point to explore this further as she has provided us with a gazetteer of the bath flasks, another artifact relating to personal hygiene. Plotting the distribution of those from first- to second-century contexts only (and thus contemporary with the toilet implements) produces a distribution that is the same as that defined as ‘Romano-British’ by Crummy. This is not what might be expected given that bathing ought to be part of a Continental/military identity. To explore this more fully one would need to include the distribution of tubular unguent bottles which served as oil containers prior to adoption of bath flasks. Wardle does not include these in her survey and so, for the moment, the enquiry must stop, but the mere fact that a start can be made illustrates the treasure trove that this volume is. It also throws into stark relief a major problem with London's Roman archaeology and this is the way it has, or more regularly has not, been published.
Reece makes the point well when he says ‘London is the only large settlement for which we do not have reliable full coin lists … which means that we can say very little about coin use in London compared with either the rest of Britain or the mainland of the empire’ (48). The same could be said about the rest of the material culture from London. There is no way for us to understand London because we cannot include it in the wider comparative surveys that use data from the rest of the province. A volume like this is both fascinating and extremely frustrating because it shows the wealth of data there is, and highlights the difficulty of accessing it. Until London's Roman archaeology is published properly, this volume is as good as it is going to get, and that is very good indeed.
The book is beautifully produced with a wealth of illustrations, many in colour. Buy it, read it and enjoy.
