This large paperback comprises eight chapters and a glossary and six appendices together with a cd-rom. In it Dr Hayward has attempted to provenance the earliest Roman funerary and monumental lithics to be found in southern England. Although worked sandstones are mentioned in the text, he has restricted himself to carbonates, and then almost exclusively to limestones and especially those of Jurassic age.
The initial two chapters outline the general geology of limestones, concentrating on those of southern Britain, and then describe the investigative methods employed in provenancing them. This has been done by sampling the artefacts and submitting them to his ‘integrated petrological methodology’, namely standard thin-section transmitted light petrography using stained sections, alongside X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence (for a restricted range of elements) and finally stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis. The resulting data are compared with those he collected from in situ limestone and chalk samples from southern and central England and northern France. Comprehensive collecting is, of course, almost impossible, as Dr Hayward acknowledges, as the outcrops of suitable limestone and chalk are monumentally large, making potential quarry sites legion. It is therefore surprising just how sanguine Dr Hayward becomes when he interprets these data.
Chapters 3–5 use these lithological techniques to describe twenty-eight first-century tombstones and thirty-six architectural fragments; the numbers were constrained by availability and time. The data are given in textural, graphical and pictorial form; this may be the most long-lasting legacy, especially the photomicrographs. Chapters 6 and 7 use the provenancing data to discuss limestone stone supply in England during the early part of the Roman occupation. The final chapter is a useful and accurate synopsis.
Dr Hayward concludes that the early use of carbonate freestones in Britannia can be split into two main phases. Initially there was Claudian and Neronian legionary quarrying; here, known continental supplies, including freestone from the Rhineland, were rapidly replaced by native ‘English’ sources, suggesting that the economic potential of the Middle Jurassic escarpment of central England was known to Roman (military) stone workers ‘surveyors, geologists, quarrymen and masons’ from very early on. This was succeeded by Flavian to Hadrianic quarrying where Bath stone from the Cotswolds became a major source of freestone and where the limited uses of continental stone (obtained from northern France) were either associated with the Classis Britannica or were restricted, as with Fishbourne Palace, to isolated status statements.
The main body of the book reads well; it is slightly repetitive (but, as much is very data-rich, this is no hardship) and the use of ‘distribution maps’ tying in limestone outcrops, supply routes and source sites is pivotal to understanding the archaeology. Less care and attention has been paid to the appendices and cd-rom and this detracts from the authority of the main text. The entries for aragonite and dolomite in the glossary carry factual errors and other entries, namely those for geochemical techniques, are uninformative. Some of the data within the data tables are presented in non-standard ways. The geological maps in the cd-rom are missing their stratigraphical column and this means that much of their value has been misplaced, doubly so for the French maps where English background geological knowledge is no help.
Despite these slight disturbances the book is useful for someone trying to provenance common English carbonate freestones. On three separate occasions Dr Hayward's text and photomicrographs have assisted me in suggesting origins for (medieval) southern English limestones.
