The purpose of this volume is straightforward: it is to provide a synthesis and assessment of the contribution that developer-funded archaeology has made to the principal towns of Roman Britain since 1990. By ‘principal’ is meant towns presumed to be coloniae, municipia and civitas capitals. It contains eleven chapters in all, including an opening introduction by Holbrook and a concluding discussion by Fulford. London and York each get their own chapters, while the towns of the rest of England are grouped in the South-East, the South-West and the Midlands/North. There is a chapter on planning and commercial archaeology, and three thematic chapters on burial archaeology, archaeobotany and zooarchaeology.

The well-written papers summarise some of the particularly eye-catching discoveries, but also do not shy away from articulating the main structural weaknesses of commercial urban archaeology. Bryant and Thomas, in dealing with PPG 16-led archaeology, suggest that one of the greatest advances in the last quarter of a century has come not from commercial work per se, but from the impetus PPG 16 provided to establish better urban archaeological databases such as the Urban Archaeological Database and the Extensive Urban Survey programmes. They also note the areas where advances have been much more negligible – improving the standards of some commercial work, publication and archive deposition.

The chapter on Roman London (Perring) deals with the development of the town from much-debated military origins to late in the Roman period. It is worthy and illustrated with useful plans, but ultimately uninspiring. The questions posed are old ones, and there is little evidence that more nuanced research questions have been provoked by the data. This may well be the result of funding arrangements determined by commercial archaeology, as Perring himself suggests. The stand-out statement, however, at least for this reviewer, is that two-thirds of the important excavations undertaken of Roman London in the last twenty-five years have yet to be published in full.

For York, Ottaway remarks that the last twenty years have seen most work take place outside the historic core. There have been significant discoveries, such as the Driffield Terrace cemetery for executed males, but environmental studies have stagnated, grey literature reports accumulate while full publication remains problematic. What is required now, Ottaway suggests, is not necessarily more fieldwork, but a project designed to harness the research dividend that lies within already completed work. These three themes – occasional spectacular discoveries, lack of full publication and failure to obtain new research insights from the data already acquired – provide the mood music, both high and low notes, for the rest of the volume.

Fulford divides his paper on the towns of south-east England into Late Iron Age origins or predecessors, Roman intramural and then extramural results. Pre-Roman discoveries, such as the burials at Stanway (Colchester) and Folly Lane (St Albans), and the Late Iron Age activity at Fishbourne (Chichester), are obvious highlights. However, despite major area excavations within the walled circuits of all the major towns of the south east since 1990, only two have seen full publication. In the south west, important advances have been forthcoming with regard to unexpected installations and structures outside the legionary fortress at Exeter, but Holbrook rightly stresses that the major weakness of developer-funded urban archaeology has been the lack of significant progress with regard to publication. The towns of the Midlands and the north have seen more work take place outside their historic cores, with important advances in knowledge about the nature of extramural areas, but Bidwell, recognising the problem of publication, argues that, for the results of commercial archaeology to be realised in full, there needs to be some sort of stage beyond the output processes of developer-funded archaeology.

Incongruously, the chapter on the dead brings some relief, arguably because it is a thematic, as opposed to a geographically constrained, offering. We learn that inhumation was widespread in the early Roman period, that some funerary ceremonies were marked by extensive destruction of objects and commodities and that between 40 and 60 per cent of people in Roman Britain seemed to have moved considerable distances in their lives. But even here Pearce suggests that the lack of print publication greatly compromises the research potential of the new data. Robinson (archaeobotany) and Maltby (zooarchaeology) both flag discoveries (eg large-scale grain storage or systematic cattle-carcass butchery in towns) while both lament the dominance of grey literature and the lack of full publication.

Fulford’s concluding chapter strikes a suitably downbeat note and deserves to be read more than once. He itemises some key steps to address the significant problems of commercial archaeology, and soberly suggests that if publication of a key urban site has not occurred within ten years the chances of it ever appearing are negligible. While agreeing that the issue of non-publication has an ancestry that precedes 1990, he recognises that this failing is still pervasive and persistent. This reviewer found these observations justified, but ultimately depressing. Reviewed from a distant future it is hard to escape the anticipated judgements of successor archaeologists that our profession, in the first quarter of a century of urban commercial archaeology, just did not get it right.