Frocester was one of the great British excavations of the last century, sharing with Wharram, Crickley and Hen Domen (to name an invidious few) longevity, a reliance on volunteers, characterful directors and a contribution to our knowledge of a particular site-type that made their reports essential quarries for every textbook and period overview.

Eddie Price, working gentleman-farmer and excavator, dedicates this third substantial and self-published monograph on the Romano-British villa beneath his land at Frocester (complemented by a previously published fourth on the later village) to his almost 900 volunteers in verse: ‘none of you remain anonymous/The excavation notebooks remind me of your achievements and each name’. This is a generous, and I might say, typically self-effacing gesture by the man who really made it happen, fitting in summer seasons of excavation and winter-time documentary research alongside running a substantial mixed farm – and a few other odd jobs such as personally re-roofing the stone-tiled roof of Frocester Court's thirteen-bay monastic barn.

Everything about the Frocester reports is very professional indeed, in part because Eddie himself is genuinely expert, but also because he has encouraged and gently persuaded many scholars over the years to comment on, and write commentaries about, his discoveries, especially the finds: here Jenny Price on some rather fine glass, Arthur Price (also a farmer-scholar and Eddie's son, I suspect) on stone building materials, Jane Timby on pottery and Tim Darvill, a local lad, on the flintwork.

Darvill also contributes a very useful Foreword which summarizes the history of the excavation and outlines the story it has revealed. Work started at Frocester Court, beneath the Cotswold escarpment, almost fifty years ago under Captain H S Gracie. Eddie was a willing participant, and by the time of Gracie's death in 1979 had the experience to take over the project's direction. What he brought with him, as is pointed out, was a farmer's eye for topography and the personal experience of ploughing and working the same land as the villa-dwellers almost 2,000 years before – and, indeed, their prehistoric forefathers. To hear him talk about 2,000 years of land exploitation at Frocester is quite unlike any other site tour I have ever had: vivid yet subtle, borne of a deep understanding of a particular place, its surrounds and soils, and wryly humorous: it was Eddie himself who, under government direction, ploughed out the medieval ridge and furrow.

While it is the villa for which the excavations are best known, there is a longer and richer narrative, as Darvill's summary draws out. This begins with occupation of a gravel ridge from perhaps as early as the later third millennium bc, with a trackway, land divisions and a well in the second, perhaps connected with barrows and a burnt mound nearer the Cotswold escarpment. Around 200 bc, a ditched farmstead surrounded by small fields was set up, which survived through several centuries of remodelling, rectangular building replacing round in about ad 200. It was in the late third century – or so it would appear – that there was massive investment in a new stone villa of winged courtyard form – deep foundations suggest it had at least two storeys – and with an internal bath-house. This lay at the centre of a wider estate landscape of courtyard, formal garden, paddocks and fields: industrial activity and malting kilns are also reported on. Neglected in the later fourth century, this substantial house was burnt down in the early fifth, although occupation of a sort continued for many decades, or more, within the shell. All the indications are that the land-unit itself survived, to re-emerge as a royal and then, from the 820s, monastic estate, which it remained until the Dissolution.

Frocester's time-depth, the extent of the investigations over fifty years and the well-organized and illustrated final reports, mean that not only Romanists will find them of interest. For instance, the archaeological evidence for the development from the late Saxon period of ridge-and-furrow ploughing, and its gradual encroachment ever nearer to, and eventually over, the rubble heap of the former villa – which lent its name to Big Stanborough Field – surpasses anything that I am aware of, and suggests that excavation may well have a role to play in investigating the elusive origins of the country's open fields.

As this volume was in preparation (2008), Eddie Price, a Fellow since 1981, was appointed a Member of the British Empire for his services to archaeology. This recognition gave enormous satisfaction and pleasure, not just to Eddie and his supportive family, but to all who have had the pleasure of sharing something of the Frocester story with him. Its publication gives cause for celebration to be redoubled.