The three volumes under review here are all concerned with examples of a class of site often loosely described as ‘small towns’, though only two (Great Chesterford and Staines) were sufficiently well known to feature in detail in the 1990 volume on The ‘Small Towns’ of Roman Britain (B.C. Burnham and J.S. Wacher).

Most of the volume on Staines comprises six reports on a series of sites excavated within the core of the Roman and later town between 1977 and 1989. Considerable effort has been made to standardise their presentation in the printed report, despite the circumstances of the individual excavations and some significant variations in the coverage of their specific stratigraphies and associated finds. Additional material about the stratigraphy and the finds catalogues, together with most of the tables, has been consigned to a digital supplement which can be accessed as a downloadable pdf on the Surrey County Council website (easily located in the section about SpoilHeap Publications). I suspect that most general readers will focus on the summary chapter at the outset (1–52), which seeks to contextualise the material from these and other excavated areas within a wider narrative covering the origins, development and changing status of the town from prehistory through to the mid-nineteenth century. More specialised readers will no doubt find the presentation of a new type series of Roman pottery from the town of particular interest and value.

The summary chapter presents a reasonably coherent story about the development of Roman Staines: settlement began in the pre-Flavian era, apparently without any military stimulus, on a gravel island adjacent to a major crossing over the Thames on the London to Silchester road; already by the Flavian period its inhabitants were engaged in iron production, with occupation straddling both sides of the road and extending into the land behind; activity intensified in the second century, when the town flourished as a market centre and stopping place providing a range of services; most buildings were of timber, with clay floors, but some were clearly more sophisticated to judge from the presence of wall-plaster, tessellated and mosaic flooring, and window glass at various locations along the High Street; the later second and third centuries saw a period of contraction, mirroring other sites in South-East Britain, perhaps exacerbated by episodes of flooding along the backlands; by the fourth century, the presence of ‘black earth’ deposits heralds a change in the nature of the settlement, which apparently became much more scattered than hitherto. That such a story can now be told is a testimony to the work of all those who have laboured to recover and then publish what could so easily have been lost during the long-term redevelopment of the modern town.

The second volume on Great Chesterford is the outcome of a wider project which involved the compilation of a gazetteer of all known sites and finds collections, an assessment of which unpublished or partially published sites merited publication and extensive geophysical survey covering much of the walled town and an area of extramural settlement to the north-east. The resulting report is divided into two sections: Part One presents a wide-ranging discussion of the origin and development of the town, arranged under a series of thematic headings (1–127); Part Two comprises reports on the individual excavations (the most important of which is probably that on the temple site which lay 1 km east of the town), together with the gazetteer of known sites and a discussion of the finds (131–344). Additional catalogue material, figures and tables (including the pottery illustrations and the tabulated bone data from the temple) are relegated to an accompanying CD-ROM.

The extended discussion of the town presents a detailed review of the available evidence, drawn from a wide variety of sources ranging from the mid-19th century through to the 1990s. Following a brief account of its late Iron Age origin and the presence of a large pre-Flavian fort, much attention is focused on the morphology of the town and the extramural settlement, the temple complex and other ritual activity, the encircling cemeteries, aspects of the local economy and landscape, and the problem of the Romano-Saxon transition. Space does not permit a detailed review, though special mention might be made of the contribution of the geophysical surveys to our wider understanding of the urban layout. Some six principal roads have been identified, apparently converging on a large open space located at the heart of the town. This has been plausibly identified as a market place, apparently surrounded by several substantial masonry buildings, to add to the winged-corridor structure and the so-called ‘tax office’ excavated to the north by Brinson in the 1940s. Elsewhere, the town seems to have been further sub-divided by a series of lanes, which reinforces an impression that its development was co-ordinated rather than piecemeal. These and other insights pepper the discussion presented in this volume, emphasising just how significant an advance it represents in our knowledge of Great Chesterford; for this its author must be congratulated.

The final volume on Ariconium focuses on a site long recognised as an industrial ‘small town’, despite the limited nature of the available evidence. It represents the outcome of a project undertaken between 1998 and 2003, in part to rectify the shortcomings in our understanding, in part to assess the scale and nature of the threat posed by soil erosion and plough damage. In the process several databases were created from published and unpublished sources, which were then interogated within their own right and through GIS analysis. Most readers are likely to focus on the archaeological chapters (2, 4 and 5), though those involved in site management will also find much of interest in the chapters which discuss erosion and deposition history (3) and the future management of the site (6). Following a brief review of previous excavations and fieldwork (2), a substantial chapter (4) is devoted to the finds and, to a lesser extent, the environmental evidence. Of particular interest are the sections on the pottery (by S. Willis) and the small finds (by H.E.M. Cool), which provide valuable insight into the site's wider status, character and identity.

All this forms a prelude to the archaeological synthesis in ch. 5, which seeks to review the status and function of the site and the associated iron industry, its chronological and morphological development, and its wider role in local and regional networks. This reveals that the site had a late Iron Age origin and that it developed around a junction of several roads without any apparent military stimulus. The ceramics reinforce a message of continuity from the Iron Age into the early Roman era, while its comparatively high status is emphasised by an increasing quantity of samian during the later first century. The central occupation area never seems to have been densely built-up, though by the second and third centuries, when the settlement was at its most extensive, there is evidence for two industrial zones and several stone/stone-founded buildings; one might have been a mansio, a second could have been a temple, while a third was perhaps a town-house. By now it was not just an important iron-producing centre, but also a site with wider marketing and administrative functions. Significant activity, though seemingly on a reduced scale, extended into the mid-fourth century at least, after which the site went into decline. The synthesis concludes with a valuable review of the ironworking industry within its wider context. All this emphasises just how much can be learnt from a well-designed project without extensive excavation.

All three volumes, each in their different way, add significant new detail to the corpus of information now available for the ‘small towns’; surely the time is now ripe for the topic to be revisited at a provincial level.