Miniature votive offerings of the Roman period present a rich field of study, and although Kiernan inevitably had to restrict his data-gathering to within sensible limits, he has collected a substantial sample from across North-West Europe. Britain is quite dominant within his dataset, largely because he has used PAS finds, even though they rarely come with an archaeological context and even the provenance may be dubious. While such a bias makes the volume particularly pertinent for this province, it is perhaps rather less so for others.
He starts with a brief look at the votive practices of the prehistoric period across North-West Europe, concentrating on the Late Iron Age. This section could have done with some development, as he only considers large-scale deposition of high-value objects and omits the quite substantial body of evidence for the ritual placement of quite ordinary items relating to the agricultural cycle that were essential elements of the daily life of the individual or the community, such as pots, iron tools or loomweights. In consequence, he observes that the Roman rite of requesting something from the gods in exchange for a gift rapidly became popular in new provinces, while missing the point that this was because it closely matched the existing practice of ordinary people.
Seven chapters concentrate on individual classes of miniature or model finds: wheels, arms and armour, axes, coins, vessels and tableware, Mithrassymbole, and a mixed collection of personalia, other tools and items relating to travel. This is a pretty wide sweep across the range of miniature votive objects, but there are some notable absences, such as model body parts and miniature animals like the dog-shaped bone amulets deposited at the source of the Seine. There are also some surprising inclusions, such as the prehistoric Salisbury hoard, and some fascinating — if visually dull — inclusions, such as the pottery counters from some Gaulish sanctuaries that appear to have been used as substitute coins. His data come from a range of peoples and contexts across Europe from Britain to Raetia, yet it is surprising that he is rather rigid in some of his interpretations. For example, he concludes that the god to whom all wheel models were dedicated was the Romano-Celtic Jupiter. While this will no doubt be the case for a considerable number of wheels, others will have been given to a range of sky-gods (or goddesses), some of them highly localised deities that may, or may not, have been conflated with one from the Roman pantheon. Axes, on the other hand, are allowed a more fluid interpretation along these lines, but only because he cannot link them to the iconography of any one particular deity.
K. may have collected large numbers of axes and wheel models, but he should have tried harder to find examples of the so-called Mithrassymbole, that chiefly consist of a wide range of model tools and other practical equipment. He cites only those from some well-furnished female burials in Germany, mainly from Cologne, and also a set from a tumulus burial in Sussex (now in the British Museum), but there are, for example, several groups of miniature tools from a cemetery at Pontarion (Creuse), and at least one of these sets was with a possible male. After dismissing any association with either Mithras or Sabazius and after considering the highly varied interpretations of many other scholars, he accepts that their archaeological contexts prevent identification as votives. An element of desperation rings through his suggestions that they may be either crepundia (a girl's collection of interesting and usually amuletic objects) or impenetrably obscure equipment for the female toilette. The latter idea must be wrong (what cosmetic use might a miniature ladder and a miniature bow-saw be put to?) and there is no real point of contact with other sets of crepundia. At one point he almost reaches, but then draws back from, the obvious conclusion — that these miniatures represent the equipment necessary to work the land, repair or construct the buildings, and run the households that the people in these burials owned or expected to inherit. The tools would have been placed in their graves to ensure a continuation of their status in the afterlife. They could thus be seen as a small portable version of the Simpelveld sarcophagus, which shows on its internal walls a wealthy woman among her furniture and farm buildings. (I admit that the toads, lizards and snakes that sometimes appear with the miniature tools in Germany are less easily explained, although snakes are associated with Mercury and might represent him in his role as psychopomp.)
Those of us who are fascinated (and sometimes appalled) by the ways in which the people of the North-West provinces negotiated deals with their gods would almost certainly enjoy this book, not least because it debunks a few myths along the way and sets up a few others, and even those who are not fascinated should dip into it — they would end up more entertained than they might expect. No one will agree with everything he says and all will find the English a little wayward sometimes, but neither fact will in any way detract from the book's readability.
