There can be few more worthy recipients of a Festschrift than Barry Cunliffe. His major excavations and European-scale syntheses are core to our understanding of the European Iron Age and the Roman period. To honour this daunting breadth in a volume of tributes marking his retirement is challenging, but the editors, all with an Oxford pedigree, have assembled a good cast for the task; while such volumes often contain a share of damp squibs, this one generally maintains the interest. The twenty-four papers are split into four themes, albeit with the look of post-submission rationalization rather than predetermined intent – travellers, trade and exploration; the fringes of Europe (an eclectic mix from Jordan through North Africa to Hampshire); the ‘Celtic heartlands’; and Iron Age and Roman Britain. This obscures the Iron Age heart of the volume, with fifteen papers split evenly between British and European topics; reflecting the recipient’s own work, Roman topics take a creditable second place with six papers, while three cover a selection of other themes. The papers include some interesting ones, some intriguing, and a number of important and highly stimulating pieces. A commentary on each would overwhelm this review, but among intriguing gems we may note Coles’s fascinating observations on a rock-carving site from Bohuslän, which mirrors the well-known Hjortspring boat deposit in both iconography and site location, begging the question whether the carving commemorates that very event. Brown makes some promising observations on the value of memes as a concept in exploring the reasons behind pottery decoration, while Nash Briggs provides an anthropological approach to Greek Homeric literature that offers valuable insights for considering small-scale temperate Iron Age societies. There are also surprises – Fulford finds notably little evidence for port-to-port coastal trade in Roman Britain, in contrast to well-established longer-distance routes across the Channel and the North Sea, while Ralston, in a useful summary of Iron Age Bourges, presents a rather different, more diffused view of a Fürstensitz than the term ‘classic’ sites have accustomed us to.

A number of papers offer stimulating and thought-provoking perspectives. Manley’s anthropological approach to the oft-overlooked borders of Roman mosaics is a valuable and plausible speculation, while Bradley and Smith convincingly restore an Attic cup from the Thames to the sparse corpus of early Mediterranean imports from Britain. Jones’s paper on the interpretation of the archaeobotanical and zoological evidence from Danebury is a major step forward, weaving disparate data sets into a plausible interpretation. Taking on board the structured deposition of material in pits, he links these to episodes of consumption, and specifically to feasting connected with key events, the corn from the pit being used both for the feast and as seed-corn. The size of deposit and pit allow some understanding of the frequency and scale of these moments – he argues for more frequent family-sized events, less frequent larger feasts every three years or so, and major feasts on a generational cycle similar to the cycle of earthwork modification at the site.

Koch’s paper, on the fundamental mechanisms of the spread of Celtic languages, is another well-argued, erudite and challenging one. His interest is linguistic ‘Celticization’ – processes by which the language spread. Plausibly putting this before the Iron Age on linguistic grounds, he looks at key shared concepts in the various Celtic languages, mostly connected to elite pastimes which fit well into a Late Bronze Age milieu, less well into an earlier one; the evidence for where such developments took place is reviewed and found equivocal. It is in the movement of actors involved in this sphere, such as musicians or druids (the latter receiving valuable archaeological attention elsewhere from Fitzpatrick), that he finds a mechanism for maintaining the notable homogeneity between different language branches – through class or specialization, rather than any broader group identity. The paper’s appearance in a primarily archaeological volume is of great value in helping to smooth some of the intellectual gaps between the different disciplines concerned with ‘Celtic’ in its various guises.

The link of archaeology and history appears strongly in two numismatic papers, Gruel and Haselgrove on some British potins at Corent in the Auvergne, and de Jersey on the lack of Durotrigan gold coinage. Both find links to the Gallic War, as the mechanism for British coins moving to Gaul and (in de Jersey’s more speculative piece) the subsequent shunning of the Durotriges by their neighbours because, he argues, they failed to supply warriors to fight the good fight. This might be seen as dangerously interlinked ground; the interpretations lean on historical sources and can readily be challenged (for instance, one could invoke moving mercenaries rather than returning legionaries to explain Gruel and Haselgrove’s observations), but it is exciting to see archaeologists approach the writing of historical perspectives with a more subtle appreciation of their own material and its possibilities.

Although there are more slips of syntax and spelling than one would expect from Oxford University Press, this is otherwise an elegantly produced book (although one might expect illuminated initial capitals given the asking price of £92, which puts it all but beyond the private buyer). The sting is in the tailpiece – a listing of Cunliffe’s publications up to his retirement covers a daunting twenty pages, with ninety books and over 250 articles. And all this while dealing with the running of a major university department – what can we anticipate now he is unburdened by administration? Conscientious librarians will need to reserve some shelf space alongside this useful tome against future publications.