Despite the subtitle of the English translation, the focus of this book, first published in Dutch in 2000 and revised in that language in 2010, is not on the archaeology of the Roman army and its fortifications along the Lower Rhine. Of this there is still no up-to-date synthetic account in English. Rather it describes how the Roman Empire was experienced in the now Dutch- and Flemish-speaking parts of the provinces of Gallia Belgica and Germania Inferior, seen as a frontier zone embracing Germanic peoples beyond the Rhine as well as the inhabitants of the Empire. The book does not supersede previous syntheses in English, such as Edith Wightman's classic Gallia Belgica (1985) or Maureen Carroll's Romans, Celts and Germans: The German Provinces of Rome (2001), but it offers a thoughtful and brightly illustrated reappraisal of part of the territories they covered.

Lendering (historian) and Bosman (archaeologist) guide us through the Caesarean conquest, the wars of Augustus and Tiberius across the Rhine, the Frisian revolt of a.d. 28, the Batavian revolt of a.d. 69, the development of the Rhine frontier and of the provincial society it shielded, the imperium Galliarum of a.d. 260–73, the invasions and transformation of society in the later Empire and, finally, the rise of the Merovingian state, interestingly interpreted as having its roots in later Roman developments within the provinces rather than being a wholly separate episode introduced by external forces. The narrative is interspersed with long quotations from the literary sources, giving the whole thing the character of a source-book and meaning there is inevitable emphasis on the events which happen to be described in the literature, resulting in a heavy weighting towards the earlier imperial period.

Great play is made of the fact that ‘a 25 m high paper tower could be built from the number of reports that Dutch archaeologists wrote’ in the ten years preceding this edition, but it has to be said that the end-product is much more historical than archaeological. There are some good maps but only a single site plan. The discussion of the multi-focal military and urban complex at Nijmegen cries out for an overview plan to help the reader visualise what is described, as does the account of a palimpsest of farmsteads dating between a.d. 50 and 150 excavated in 2001 at Ellewoutsdijk near the mouth of the Scheldt. On this side of the Channel, developer-funded archaeology has revolutionised our knowledge of the lower-order rural settlements of the Roman period and it is possible to produce a striking visual atlas of the provincial countryside — see Jeremy Taylor's Atlas of Roman Rural Settlement in England (2007) and, now, A. Smith et al. New Visions of the Countryside of Roman Britain, Volume 1: The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain (2016). If commercial archaeology has the same potential in the Low Countries, as one might expect, it does not come across forcefully here.

The title of ch. 7, ‘Romanization’, might get some British commentators hot under the collar, but the difficulties surrounding the term are understood and are briefly explained (80) in a section that even introduces the concept of globalization, commenting, however, that ‘here we reach a level of abstraction that can no longer be tested with the tools historians and archaeologists have at their disposal’. Perhaps questionable are the assumptions that retired auxiliaries were an instrument of Romanization by becoming a major element in the provincial aristocracy (34, 80–1) (cf. Haynes’ scepticism in Blood of the Provinces (2013), 339–55), or that significant numbers went back to spend their retirement in Germanic societies beyond the Rhine frontier (138) (cf. James in Limes XIX (2005), 273–9).

In conclusion, readers will have to turn to other books to obtain a good visual sense of the archaeology of this frontier region, but this is a thought-provoking survey that can be recommended to the general reader and the undergraduate student alike for its lively style, useful presentation of the literary sources, and clarity in presenting a complicated subject.