This book provides significant new data on the development of Roman London, and on the complex archaeology of the upper Walbrook landscape in particular. New light is shed on old research questions through new excavation techniques and expert post-excavation analyses as we might expect from MoLA. In keeping with other MoLA publications, the book is attractive, well laid out, and contains many colour illustrations. The support of Crossrail Limited, The Mayor of London, the Department for Transport and Transport for London is acknowledged on the front cover, and a more detailed promotion of Crossrail activities is supplied on the back cover.

Despite its title, ‘roadside burial’ is not the principal focus of the book. In fact, the main part of the cemetery under discussion seems to have been focused on the other side of the Walbrook tributary, and is dealt with in C. Harward, N. Powers and S. Watson (eds), The Upper Walbrook Valley Cemetery of Roman London: Excavations at Finsbury Circus, City of London, 1987–2007 (2015). Equal prominence is given to the development of a very interesting road, probably serving the Cripplegate fort, with perhaps attendant ‘refuse’ disposal. Attention is also given to a microscopic reconstruction of the ecology of this rather ‘backwater’ landscape, as well as the use of the area for quarrying and perhaps more occasional activities. Other finds of interest are associated with transport, and include the recovery of horse remains and hipposandals. An assemblage of shoes was also recovered.

Of particular interest for the student of Roman Britain is the archaeological contextualisation of the Walbrook skulls, and (if the reader is patient) a better understanding of the taphonomic and anthropogenic mechanisms that led to a bias towards skull finds in this part of London; some rather gruesome old theories (concerning, for example, continuation of Iron Age head cults or decapitation of rebels) are perhaps debunked in the process. It is argued that the use of a flood zone for inhumation burials created an environment in which human remains were periodically exposed by flood water. The skulls were subsequently seemingly collected and placed in a roadside ditch. The grouping of skulls in an apparent placed deposit in this way shows how human agency and site formation processes combined, with the inherent buoyant qualities of crania perhaps also being a factor in the high representation of skulls.

When it comes to the few intact burials encountered on the Walbrook stream site, several of them could be labelled as ‘deviant’. We might wonder if their apparently marginalised location, across the tributary stream and therefore separated from the bulk of the cemetery, is significant. The presence of decapitations, and what appears to be at least one heavy iron restraint (which the writers curiously take pains to argue was not a dress accessory), also raise significant questions relating to peri-mortem punishment or funerary overkill. The interpretive essay on this in the book could perhaps have addressed the possibility of different agencies being involved in death and funeral respectively.

While this looks and feels like an approachable book, there is little sense of an integrated narrative. The initial phasing is written in the form of a ‘technical report’, interrupted by the interpolation of what seems to be unedited, uncredited, specialist material. This periodically overbalances the narrative into specialist concerns of typology, like pottery with a particular rim, for example, and does not seem aimed at a particular audience. Later specialist contributions do appear separately in an alternative font, but the objects discussed have not always been clearly introduced beforehand, rendering the discussion occasionally confusing. This sense of disjointedness is compounded in succeeding thematic chapters, with occasional repetition suggesting a tighter editorial hand was required. The brief conclusion appears almost apologetically at the end of the final chapter on the post-Roman period and the book lacks a concluding overview.

From personal experience of the difficulties of publishing findings and their interpretation in the developer-funded sphere, I am sure such problems as I have indicated reflect less on the producers of this volume than they do on the systematic pressures of ‘threat-led’ archaeology. It is perhaps ironic that the cover so proudly promotes its connections with an infrastructure project that has had its own problems of financial pressure and perhaps overambitious goals in the ‘real world’.