This review covers the proceedings of two quite different TRAC volumes. TRAC 2010 was the twentieth conference, held in Oxford in conjunction with the Roman Archaeology Conference, while TRAC 2011 was a shamelessly celebratory coming of age: the twenty-first conference, held in Newcastle, its original venue. Both provide a good reflection of the differences between the formats of the two conferences, but also of the strength of TRAC and its value to Roman archaeology as a whole. Given the number of papers, it is not possible to mention all, so instead this review will concentrate on particular highlights, before evaluating the health of the publication series as a whole.

TRAC 2010 presents ten papers out of a total of 42 delivered at the conference. Cutting across sessions, key themes which came through were issues of the significance of material culture, whether metal or brooches; the significance of space, from the house to the wider landscape; and inevitably, social identity. Among the diverse group of papers, particular highlights were Mills and Rajala, presenting a theoretically sophisticated example of understanding the landscape through the idea of a ceramiscene landscape, and Taylor Lauritsen's examination of doors in Pompeian houses as a corrective to some of our ideas of visibility through the house. Also dealing with the evidence from Pompeii, Ynnila's paper on the evidence of the supply of water within a single insula demonstrated how the use of water was the product of aesthetics more than functionality. The intentional deposition of brooches was the subject of Pudney's paper, using concepts of personhood and identity to explore foundation and abandonment deposits, votives, and grave goods from a range of sites in Roman Britain.

TRAC 2011 also consists of ten papers from the main sessions, prefaced by retrospectives from E. Scott and L. Allason-Jones (the latter delivered as a key-note). Scott's opening to the volume is a salutary reminder of why TRAC was needed in 1991 and how much poorer Roman archaeology would have been without it; Allason-Jones presents an entertaining overview of the potentials and pitfalls of TRAC, while arguing that ultimately, it has been a good thing for Roman archaeology overall. The papers from the sessions themselves cover a wide range of material, but overarching themes are interactions at various levels and what we might call meta-archaeology. Again, to select a couple of highlights, Van Oyen's paper on Terra Sigillata applies Actor-Network-Theory to reconcile the perennial but very current problem of the scale of the Roman Empire and the relationship between the local and global. Van Driel-Murray adds another to her series of influential TRAC papers on the military, this time a consideration of ideas of mobility and the maintenance of links among the Batavians. A different form of mobility is addressed in Mulryan's paper, which ties into current work on movement within the urban context and explores the development of devotional routes in Late Antique Rome.

Turning to the question of the health of the TRAC series, there can be a tendency to be somewhat critical about contemporary TRACs, whether the conferences themselves or the published proceedings, with a harking back to some form of Golden Age, probably the first six or seven years. This is accompanied by the claim that for TRAC to survive it needs to reinvent itself and not degenerate into a series of PhD presentations. Based upon these two volumes, this does not seem to be a real problem. Both proceedings show that TRAC still has an important role to play in Roman archaeology. While the basic format of the papers has not changed over the years, the topics considered and the theoretical models explored have. How far the debates have moved is exemplified by the papers by Greene and van Driel-Murray in TRAC 2011. In the proceedings from the second conference (P. Rush (ed.), Theoretical Roman Archaeology: Second Conference Proceedings (1995)), van Driel-Murray argued for the presence of women and children within military contexts, whereas now this can be taken as read by both authors and instead they can move the debates forward to consider their experiences and the consequences of their presence. Mills and Rajala's use of Ingold's idea of the taskscape, and Biddulph's use of Dawkins' memes both represent the exploration of new ideas and their application to the archaeological material. Both volumes include a number of papers which use ideas of analogy in sophisticated ways, such as those on the building trade and Greene's paper on Sulpicia Lepidina, leaving behind the approach of analogy by common-sense. It is this constant exploration of new ways of looking at sometimes well-worn material which represents the re-invigoration of TRAC. As long as this continues, worries about its demise are misplaced.

Nevertheless, that is not to say that TRAC can be complacent. Both publications contain excellent papers, but also those which are less successful. The most thought-provoking, and archetypal, papers include both the consideration of a theoretical premise, and its application to a body of data in order not only to demonstrate its efficacy, but also to contribute to the wider knowledge of Roman archaeology. Within both volumes, there are papers which follow this model to great effect, and Van Oyen's represents the exemplar of a good TRAC paper. At the other end of the spectrum are a small number of papers which are good scholarship in their own right, but lack theoretical content, such as Boos' paper in TRAC 2010. This is a worthy paper about poliadic deities in Italian towns, but has been published in the wrong context. More frequent are those which have a veneer of theoretical assumptions, but which do not apply these particularly successfully to the material, such as Ratliff's paper on globalisation (TRAC 2010) and Weber's on samian stamps (TRAC 2011). Fortunately the thuddingly didactic style of paper which preaches a theoretical message and eschews archaeological evidence is absent. This has been one of the strengths of TRAC throughout its history: that theory is married with archaeological evidence to produce a serious contemplation of the past.

Taken together, the two volumes show that TRAC is in good health, and that it should continue to look forwards not backwards. The diversity of papers will always mean there is something for most readers, and a different reviewer may well have had a different list of ‘top papers’. The range of international authors represented by the two volumes is a noticeable change from the early volumes and this mixing of academic traditions can only serve to strengthen the discipline. Hopefully now that the conference and publication have passed those difficult teenage years and entered their twenties, both can gain a self-confidence and certainty of their value to Roman archaeology.