There has been an upsurge of interest in Roman frontiers in recent years. The catalyst can be seen as the creation of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site in 2005. This has led to new research, particularly in Europe, and several new publications. The first book to be reviewed reflects this new strand of activity. The second, on the other hand, acknowledges a longer tradition of research into Roman frontiers, the International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies, meeting every three years, and in 2012 in Bulgaria. The holding of the Congress has long led to the publication of a review of recent work in the host country, and the second book is the offering of Bulgarian colleagues to the participants in the Congress. The third offers a review of the evidence for the Roman army in the province of Lower Moesia, modern northern Bulgaria and south-eastern Romania (Dobruja).

The Danube Limes, published in English and Hungarian, is both a report on a project supported by the European Union and a statement on the importance of the archaeology of the frontier, thereby underpinning a proposal for World Heritage Site (WHS) status. It contains a series of essays by Zsolt Visy and his World Heritage team on the archaeological evidence for the Roman frontier in Hungary and the nature of the database, supported by an extensive bibliography. They are accompanied by twenty-two photographs of the events associated with the project. These are not what we might expect in an archaeological report, but their purpose is in part to demonstrate to the funding body that the events that it supported actually took place. Also here is a statement of ‘The significance and universal World Heritage value of the Ripa Pannonica’, the Hungarian section of the Roman frontier. This statement flows from the detailed information in the short papers.

Research on the Roman frontier in Hungary has a long history. First mentioned in royal sources in the twelfth century, Renaissance scholars started recording remains, and were succeeded by such as Marsigli, an exact contemporary of John Horsley. The pace, naturally, quickened during the nineteenth century, though outside events – the revolution of 1848 – might intervene. The first law to protect archaeological sites preceded the action of the British parliament by two years. Several important synopses appeared in the second half of the twentieth century, and important aerial survey was undertaken by our Fellow Zsolt Visy, though he is modest about his significant contributions.

The catalogue of Roman military remains is not a complete list of all such sites in Hungary, but only of those in rural areas that will be included in the proposed WHS. Nevertheless, it is most useful for aerial photographs, old and new, and geophysical surveys, while ground-level shots and artefacts illustrate the list. Further papers offer more detailed information. Of particular interest to British readers will be the account of the camps at Brigetio. Here at least thirty-four camps have been located, balanced by others across the Danube to the north: it was clearly a nodal point, to use David Wilson's felicitous phrase. The camps south of the river are undated, but are tentatively linked to the Marcomannic Wars of the 160s–180s, an assumption supported by an appropriately dated coin north of the river, in Slovakia.

The towers are an important element of this section of the Roman frontier and there is a short discussion of the various types. Dating, however, remains problematic, in spite of various forms of activity, including fieldwalking. Other techniques have been used to good effect elsewhere. Sonar scanning has helped elucidate the details of underwater structures along the Danube, geophysics has provided useful information on forts and aerial survey is revealing extensive civilian remains outside forts, including a substantial villa outside the late fort of Tokod. In all cases, dating is a difficult issue. This report is important in bringing to a wider audience the significant work that is taking place in Hungary on the Roman frontier.

The editors of the book on the Bulgarian frontier offer twenty papers covering a wide range of topics. They can be divided into several groups: reviews of the military history, occupation and equipment; architecture and portraiture; economy and production; religion and burial, particularly Christianity in both cases. These papers reveal the richness of the archaeological and architectural remains of the Lower Danube, the latter as indicated by Dimitrov's paper on the architectural orders.

There is insufficient space here to do more than highlight specific papers. One of these is Cholakov on ‘ancient economy … based on finds of tools …’. Their distribution emphasises the importance of rural settlements in the hinterland of the cities in the production of food (and wine) and the predominance of agriculture over stock breeding, except in the environs of forts. Villa rustica estates have also yielded a significant number of the wood- and stone- and metalworking tools found in Bulgaria, indicating the importance of such estates for the economy of the province, yet there is little evidence for innovations in tools during the Roman period.

Two papers review archaeological and historical issues relating to invasions and destructions. Varbanov considers the value of coin hoards as ‘reliable historical evidence’ in the face of the lack of literary or other sources for the mid-third century, concluding that this might be possible after the publication of all the known coin hoards. Vagalinski returns to a thorny issue, the positive identification of destructions caused by enemy action. His review encompasses the whole of the Danube frontier and embraces the problems of interpreting coin hoards as well as other archaeological evidence. He concludes that earlier archaeologists have been too keen to see destruction deposits as evidence for enemy action and that new stratigraphical evidence is required before such interpretations can be substantiated. Further, the archaeological evidence needs to be judged on its own merits and not primarily in relation to the documentary sources. This collection of essays ends with a valuable contribution by Dintchev on the late Roman east Balkan barrier wall and its comparators, helping to cast light on these largely poorly understood military installations.

Florian Matei-Popescu offers an entirely different approach, more traditionalist but nevertheless highly valuable. It is a review of the military units in the province of Moesia Inferior, detailing their history and discussing their officers and soldiers, tile stamps and other relevant material – a classic PhD subject, but none the worse for that. Indeed, it would well serve as a template for similar treatments of the provincial Roman armies. There is relevance here, too, for Britain, not least in the form of units of Britons serving in Moesia Inferior and officers, such as M Maenius Agrippa, holding posts in both provinces.