This is a difficult monograph to review for there is much here. But a study where the first paragraph — a quotation — is incorrectly referenced as is the fourth citation on the same page and where R.G. Collingwood is described as a ‘historian’ does not inspire confidence. This monograph is an updated version of a PhD thesis, one which seems to have been subsequently supplemented, as evidenced by the same sort of howlers (e.g. works referenced in the text but missing from the bibliography include Hingley 2003, Lewontin et al. 1988, Millett 1990a or b, Read 2003, and Woolf 1985 etc. — most of which cannot easily be identified; errors with in-text citations Bourdieu 1988 (=1986), Checkland 1998 (= Checkland & Howells 1998), Darwin 1959 (=1859) etc.).

The origins of the thesis and therefore this monograph lie with funding from the European Union's V framework programme on Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development. With TiGrESS (Time Geographical Approaches to Emergence and Sustainable Societies) the EU has invested in a project developing Time-Geography (TG), which denotes ‘… the importance of time and space in the constitution of the human condition’ (5). But TG, we are told, has its problems: it usually focuses on the individual and works at the micro-level while TiGrESS investigated the usefulness of a multi-scalar approach to human space time behaviour. Such a methodology can ‘… develop a conceptual model about the impact of the human perception on the landscape’ (5), or so the author claims.

This is the backdrop. The text is arranged in two parts: one with six ‘chapters’ (‘A Conceptual Model of Innovation’) and a second of seven ‘chapters’ (‘Case Study — Theory Evaluating’), which takes an aspect of the archaeological record of the North-Western provinces of the Roman Empire as its template to ‘prove’ the model. With a bibliography and two appendices (‘Raw data from 46 British Iron Age sites’ and ‘Frequencies of the 9 skeletal elements … for the 37 Iron Age sites’), all in all, there are 105 pages of text, with the first third devoted to the theory.

In the Introduction and ch. 1, the objectives are set out. In the second chapter we are offered a critique of ‘innovation’ in order to establish a definition which can ‘be applied in different branches of the social sciences namely: archaeology, social geography, economics and policy research’ (2). Ch. 3 discusses ‘the sociological context (of innovation)’. Ch. 4 moves to explaining why humans innovate — or rather are reluctant to do so. This chapter argues that innovation should be seen as a process of reconceptualisation rather than the generation of technological know-how or economic growth.

In Part Two, the model for innovation is applied to ‘North-Western Europe’ in the period 50 b.c.–a.d. 50; in the subsequent chapters the question is why the bone assemblages of a number of Late Iron Age sites change (= innovate) over time. Before that data can be assessed, Dürrwächter feels it important to conceptualise or define ‘Romanization’. The summary offered here, however, of the on-going dialogue on the phenomenon is inadequate; none of the recent works of Mattingly and Hingley (among many others who should have been included) are cited: the reference to Mattingly 2004 has not made it into the bibliography. The nearest we get to a definition is that ‘… Romanization should be seen as dialectic change’ (37) and criticisms of the traditional perception that it was an ‘imperialistic’, top-down process. There seems to be a sense of confusion where the author writes that: ‘Successful Romanization has been linked to incipient urbanisation and an increase in social complexity’ (42). What does ‘successful’ in this respect mean? By linking such changes to the emerging Roman presence in Gaul, Germany and ultimately south-eastern England, the author argues that comparable processes of change (= innovation) might be detectable in other forms of evidence. In this instance she employs the faunal evidence from a large number of sites in late Iron Age and early Roman Britain.

What we have here, it seems to me, reiterates the sense that the data have been made to fit the model. This is not to say that the data have been manipulated, but rather that previous analysis of the same data has already more than hinted at the conclusions offered herein. Most of those conclusions could be disentangled without reference to the modelling developed here and indeed without resorting to the paradigm that is ‘Romanization’, with all the problems and baggage that comes with it. Change did take place, but does it need to be called Romanization? Indeed, one is again left thinking that a more interesting question is what would be the conclusion if the word ‘Romanization’ was to be taken out? There is another striking oddity about the way the data reviewed here have been treated. Time-Geography approaches evidently emphasise the role of the environment, but there is nothing here concerning the physical landscape as a factor in animal rearing/exploitation regimes in Britain.

The formatting of the text is idiosyncratic. There are numerous typographic errors and other glitches. Some authors' names have acquired new spellings between the text and the bibliography. Some of the maps are sloppy (e.g. in fig. 11: where are the Durotriges who, at p. 41, were such a problem for the early Roman invaders?). Despite the monograph's title, Gaul and Germany do not really feature in the analysis and conclusions. In other words this is really a study about ‘innovation’ in south-east England. It is churlish to emphasise the extent to which the writer generalises or otherwise misunderstands the archaeology of the North-Western provinces along with the way it has been studied. There are, however, many questionable statements (e.g. there is apparently ‘… almost no evidence for British soldiers serving on the continent’ (42 — what of J.C. Mann and B. Dobson, ‘The Roman army in Britain and Britons in the Roman army’, Britannia 4 (1973), 191–205?)).