This volume is the outcome of an AHRC-funded joint research project between the British Museum and the University of Leicester. The project and the resulting book seek to deepen our understanding of why so many coin hoards were deposited in Britain during the Iron Age and especially in the later Roman period. The authors emphasise at the start that this volume is not intended as another numismatic study of hoard contents but instead offers thoughts and an up-to-date discussion on the reasoning behind the odd phenomenon of hoard deposition.

The debate of the nature of hoards and hoard deposition is an ongoing one, as both prehistoric and historic periods offer us a huge amount of study material. For the later Roman period, the discussion was rekindled in 2010 with the discovery of the Frome hoard of 52,503 coins, which was fortunately not lifted on discovery by the detectorists who found it, allowing archaeologists and numismatists the unique opportunity of investigating such a substantial coin hoard in situ and a chance to record the exact location of each individual coin during its excavation. The authors note at the outset that highlighting the landscape context of hoards in this project was a relatively new venture for numismatics. Indeed, the publication of this volume is timely, given that the last two decades have seen an increase in the publication of metalwork hoards with a special emphasis on their place within their landscape settings. This means that, rather than seeing the find-spot of each hoard as incidental, it is now seen as an integral part of the find itself. In this respect, the work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme has given us much food for thought; with the increased use of GPS by many metal-detectorists and fieldwalkers, we increasingly have not only got the objects but also exact find-spots. This allows us to understand single finds as well as hoards in a new light and go beyond the basic study of typology, numismatics and material science. The volume's authors acknowledge that numismatics lags somewhat behind prehistoric metalwork studies in this respect and much ground needs to be made up, but this volume certainly provides an excellent starting point.

Although the late Roman coin hoard found at Frome provided the starting point for this research, it was decided early on – rightly in my opinion – also to include Britain's Iron Age coin hoards and discuss them alongside their later ‘counterparts’ (here, the authors acknowledge Philip de Jersey who made his datasets available for their study).

The volume is divided into nine chapters. Chapters 2 and 7 offer in-depth discussions of more traditional hoard analyses, such as their contents and chronology, while in chapter 3 economic grounds for hoard deposition are presented alongside discussion of possible ritual aspects for hoard composition and deposition. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the dataset in more detail, considering hoards within their individual landscape settings, in relation to other Roman sites, such as settlements, villas and religious sites, and, importantly, in relation to earlier (prehistoric) monuments as well as natural landmarks such as rivers and other watery contexts. The thorough discussion of the latter type of context is particularly intriguing for prehistorians like me and feels oddly familiar in a volume for which the impetus was a third-century Roman coin hoard. Chapter 8 takes us back to the start of the project: the Frome hoard. It considers the hoard's discovery, its landscape setting and how it compares to its contemporaries, and also uses it as a case study in an attempt to explain why so many third-century a.d. coin hoards have been found in Britain. Lastly, in chapter 9, the authors skilfully tie together all these threads and also provide a starting point for a more focused interprovincial analysis.

With nine very detailed chapters, 267 figures, 27 tables and a very useful and thorough index, this volume is a tour de force and should be considered by archaeologists as well as numismatists. Most importantly, prehistorians should also add this book to their essential reading lists. Hoarding is a phenomenon that stretches over several millennia, but specialists and researchers have too often and for too long sat in two camps: prehistoric hoarding of bronze and iron metalwork and Iron Age and Roman hoarding of coins. It is time for the prehistorians to look forward and for Roman numismatists to look back: this excellent volume provides the perfect starting point for a dialogue and should be on the reading lists of all of us.