The 1993–5 excavations at Heybridge, undertaken in advance of the development of an extensive area for housing, afforded a significant opportunity to investigate a site which had hitherto been recognised in the literature as a port involved in continental trade and as a ‘small town’. While the total development extended over 29 ha, in the event, as the report makes clear, only c. 18 ha was actually subjected to varying degrees of investigation (ix). More significantly, the excavation strategy resulted in only c. 18 per cent of the entire development being explored in detail, while even on the 1994–5 site (which encompassed some of the most significant parts of the settlement) only about one third of the machine-stripped area was examined in depth (12). Any discussion of the resulting interpretations must necessarily bear this variable level of sampling in mind.

The volume under review represents only one half of the resulting report on the excavations. It is designed as ‘a synthetic presentation of what the authors feel to be the most important aspects of the Late Iron Age to early Saxon settlement’ (13). They are articulated in a series of thematic chapters which cover settlement morphology (ch. 3), settlement status and economy (ch. 4), social and political structure (ch. 5), religious practice and belief (ch. 6), funerary practices (ch. 7) and environment and landscape (ch. 8). Constant cross-reference is made throughout to Volume 2, which presents the essential stratigraphic descriptions alongside the finds and environmental records. This is freely and easily available as a monograph report in Internet Archaeology (at http://intarch.ac.uk). At the post-excavation stage the site narrative was reworked to present the data not by excavation area but by the ‘archaeologically tangible settlement units of enclosure systems and open areas’ (12). While this works well in Volume 1, most of the specialist reports in Volume 2, which were largely drafted by 2000, refer to the former system, despite some subsequent partial editing and adjustment.

Despite the constraints so often imposed on excavation and publication by the nature of development-led archaeology, it is clear that our understanding of the morphology of the late Iron Age to early Saxon settlement at Heybridge has been significantly enhanced. Particular interest attaches to the evidence for a significant remodelling of the site in the later Iron Age, tentatively dated to the a.d. 20s and 30s, which saw the imposition of a series of metalled roads and enclosures across the existing settlement, together with a remodelling of an earlier sacred site with a new temple precinct. None of the associated evidence supports an earlier suggestion that the site was a port involved in continental trade. Thereafter the story is one of broad continuity within the established infrastructure throughout the first and second centuries — though the temple was remodelled in the early second century — followed by phases of contraction probably towards a settlement nucleus west of the temple during the later second to fourth centuries. The religious focus continued into the late fourth century, at which point its former boundary was overlain by a substantial building tentatively identified as an early Christian chapel. Contraction clearly continued into the fifth century, though the precise nature of the Roman-Saxon transition still remains unclear despite the extent of the excavated areas.

Much attention is focused throughout the report on the status and function of the settlement, reflecting the prevailing research agendas at the time when the excavations were undertaken. The resulting discussion uses a wide range of data drawn from the site to nuance the settlement's interpretation as a ‘small town’, emphasising in the process that ‘Heybridge possessed town-like attributes at various stages of its existence’ (59). While some might dispute the relevance of such concerns, the report's conclusions represent a significant advance on previously generalised and simplistic models, which were over-reliant on aspects of settlement morphology. The ability to nuance questions of status, drawing as it does on the potential locked up in the artefactual and environmental assemblages, further emphasises the need for an up-to-date review of the vastly increased dataset now available for other ‘small towns’ to match current work on the larger towns and the countryside.

The nature of the work undertaken at Heybridge raises the inherent problems of all developer-led excavations which have been well rehearsed recently by Mike Fulford (in M. Fulford and N. Holbrook (eds), The Towns of Roman Britain: The Contribution of Commercial Archaeology since 1990 (2015)). The authors of the current report also ask the pertinent question as to whether, in the light of their Heybridge experience, we can afford to allow the destruction of such important resources without a more effective research-led response undertaken over an extended timescale (142). That so much was achieved is to be applauded, but there can be little doubt about their observation that ‘the financial constraints of modern archaeological research must shoulder the responsibility for the absence of much that could not be attempted, and for much that was but simply [could] not be presented’ (14). Therein lies the challenge for the future.