Although the use of coal in Roman Britain has been postulated since the mid-eighteenth century, its study by Romano-British archaeologists has been sporadic. The principal studies have been those of Cunnington (1933), Collingwood (1937), Webster (1955), and Dearne and Branigan (1993). This new volume, based on a PhD thesis, is a valuable addition to this small corpus. The book focuses on the evidence from the Yorkshire/Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire and Lancashire/Cheshire coalfields, but inevitably also draws upon evidence from further afield.

The book begins with a review of previous studies in the field, and with an overview of the nature and distribution of coal deposits in Britain. Ch. 3 attempts, for the first time, to study the relationship between the coal deposits and the Romano-British settlement of a region. Travis argues that the main economic activity of the regions under discussion was the extraction of coal, ironstone, sandstone and gritstone, and that it therefore follows that the settlement pattern was largely determined by these activities and the distribution of the raw materials they exploited. In trying to establish how the coal deposits were mined (ch. 4), the author has little direct evidence to work with and has to draw on information from other industries (lead- and gold-mining) and other regions and provinces, and is unable to add anything to what has been said before. Turning to the important matter of the extent to which coal was transported as a commodity in Roman Britain, T. provides a useful summary of the evidence for local transportation on the road system, and challenges the widespread assumption that transport by sea was largely as ballast material in empty grain ships returning from voyages to supply the northern garrisons. He argues that such a practice would be risky in terms of both contamination and fire, and that ships may have been commissioned specifically to carry coal cargoes. If right, then it would suggest a much greater and more deliberate usage of coal in Roman Britain than has previously been envisaged, a viewpoint which T. is happy to adopt. As to the uses to which coal was put by Romano-Britons (ch. 6), T.’s study confirms its use as a domestic fuel, for agricultural kilns and smithing, for both civilian and military iron- and lead-working, and (with selected coals) for pottery and tile production.

The book is illustrated with a large number of maps, plans and photographs of varying quality, and has eleven appendices of variable importance. The last is a useful gazetteer of c. 50 sites from the region which have evidence of Romano-British use of coal, but the fact that one-third of the sites are in fact of uncertain date emphasises that the evidence for Romano-British coal use is still relatively slim. Nevertheless this is both a useful and a challenging book, attempting as it does to relate settlement patterns to the distribution of coal sources, and to argue for a more extensive and deliberate use of coal than has been previously envisaged. Hopefully it will encourage excavators to pay more attention to coal and the contexts from which they recover it in future.