This handsomely produced excavation report details investigations undertaken by (what is now) the Museum of London Archaeology at 10 Gresham Street in the City of London from 1999–2002. Ten phases of activity were revealed, mainly spanning the Roman (periods 3–7) and the post-Roman centuries (periods 8–10).
There is much in this volume to excite the interests of specialists and non-specialists alike. The Roman phases include an important structural sequence from the first and second centuries AD, including a number of circular structures built in the period immediately following the Boudican revolt and destruction of the early Roman settlement in AD 60/1. These buildings were associated with a rectangular structure used for the production of glass beads in an Iron Age style. A reorganisation of the area saw the construction of strip buildings, subsequently burnt down in the Hadrianic period. The excavators make a useful distinction between the idea of a ‘Hadrianic fire’ and fires during the Hadrianic period (pp. 61–62). Occupation appears to tail off in the late Roman period with a few poorly preserved stone structures suggestive of the urban changes associated with the transition to Late Antiquity.
After an early medieval hiatus, the site was reoccupied in the tenth century. High-status stone-built domestic structures of twelfth-century date, elements of the church of St Michael Wood Street, an unusual group of late thirteenth-century glass vessels and metal-working dated to the fifteenth century will ensure that this volume will find a place on the shelves of medievalists. A final section on the fragmentary remains of the post-medieval period brings the story of the site to a close.
This report is the product of considerable labour by the authors and specialist contributors, and they are to be congratulated in bringing a complex and deeply stratified urban site to publication. The volume does, however, raise serious questions about the way that archaeological excavations are currently published. Some of these questions are symptomatic of a wider malaise in commercial archaeology and as such deserve some consideration.
The finds reports offer a series of frustrations to users. Table 14, for example, presents the percentages of different Roman ceramic building materials found on site. It accompanies three pages of discussion but nowhere in the text or the table are the total weights and counts provided. This reviewer suspects an editor's knife has been wielded with too much vigour and the critical information excised.
Moving on to the Romano-British ceramics, we are presented with a beautiful series of illustrated sherds that includes colour photographs. This is a visual feast but the reader will look in vain for any quantified data to accompany it (with the exception of Table 16, which provides quantification for the entire site assemblage by the unhelpful ‘ware’ but not fabric). Of the 2629 sherds mentioned in the discussion of late Roman phase 7 (p. 102), none are illustrated or discussed in the pottery report. Meanwhile, just over two pages of samian stamps are accompanied by only half a page of text (pp. 165–68). A further five and a half pages of mortaria stamps are presented without any discussion whatsoever (pp. 168–74) and the reader will look in vain for a report on the amphorae.
The amphorae report is not the only lacuna. Particularly galling is the absence of any discussion or catalogue of the coins, which are mentioned in passing as dating evidence in the stratigraphic text. One may also contrast the publication of the unusual medieval glass (fig. 142—lacking profiles) with the immaculately presented Roman glass (figs 127–34).
Puzzled by these absences, the reader may turn to the back of the volume in the hope that the answers to their questions will be found on the accompanying CD. This, however, contains a mere 2.25MB of tables (mainly relating to environmental and faunal data). Given this situation, the reviewer struggles to understand why space has been devoted in the printed volume to long lists of stamped sherds when they are of interest to only a small minority of readers. Equally, if the pottery quantification tables were deemed too dull for the printed page why are they (or the pottery database) not included on the CD? Where are the missing reports on coins and amphorae?
It is not just the finds reports that cause concern. The stratigraphic discussion of the Roman period feels at times almost as if it is driven by the broad meta-narrative of London's development. While the outlines of the city's fortunes between c. AD 50 and c. AD 450 are well known, we need to allow the evidence from individual sites to speak. The late Roman phase 7 (AD 300–410) is dismissed as ‘decline’ (p. 102), yet quarrying, pitting and refuse disposal attest to activity. Unless we try to understand what this activity was we will never come closer to understanding late Roman London.
More generally, this volume asks us to look around and question what is the purpose of archaeological publication. Recent decades have seen a drive towards synthesis, but this seems to be a pseudonym for ‘publication lite’. Commercial contractors want to publish and in some cases they need to publish for financial reasons; there is also a great temptation to put words between hardcovers to produce a volume that appears fine and satisfies the client's demands. The value of an archaeological monograph, however, lies not in its appearance but in its usefulness. If you want to delve no further than worrying about how roundhouses became strip buildings then this report is perfectly adequate. For anything more detailed, the student and specialist alike will be left frustrated. We live and work in an imperfect world, but as a discipline and industry we can and should be able to do better with the resources available.
