This well-edited volume, entirely in English, is the thirteenth in the Ancient Textiles Series published by the University of Copenhagen's Centre for Textile Research and Oxbow. It is also one of the published outcomes of the Europe-funded five-year research project, Clothing and Identities in the Roman World (DressID) and follows on from a workshop held by DressID's ‘Group E’ in 2009, Work and Identity: The Agents of Textiles Production and Exchange in the Roman Period. In fact, nowhere in the volume is the nitty-gritty of ‘making’ textiles dealt with. Instead most of the thirteen contributions show how archaeological finds, especially textile tools, on the one hand, and texts and inscriptions on the other, can be used to prove the scale of textile production and to identify some of the groups and individuals involved.

It may be that much of the material presented here has been seen in other contexts. At least three authors have already produced monographs on closely related subjects (Margarita Gleba, Jinyu Liu and Miko Flohr). And a survey article by Kordula Gostenčnik, on evidence for textile production in Roman Noricum, has many similarities with a section by her in an earlier CTR/Oxbow volume, Textiles and Textile Production in Europe from Prehistory to AD 400 (2012). But Gostenčnik's and two other survey articles by archaeologists also involved in the 2012 publication, Gleba on pre-Roman Italy and Karina Grömer on Iron Age Austria, are nevertheless excellent and could be considered the backbone of this latest volume.

Of the seven or so contributions based principally on written sources, two by papyrologists, Kerstin Dross-Krüpe and Sophie Gällnö, stand out as the best grounded. Could it be that papyri, themselves organic and the product of archaeology, lead those who study them to an awareness of other organic finds and the people who produced them? In addition to a wide variety of written evidence, Dross-Krüpe uses fragments of cotton cloth evidently of Indian origin found at Berenike to confirm the textile trade with India.

Other text-based papers largely ignore actual textiles, though these have by now been recovered in large numbers, particularly at desert sites. Such a blinkered approach can lead to problems, as in the article by Lena Larsson Lovén, on the evidence for women producing textiles within households: ‘When the cloth had been finished, it was turned into garments’ (116). The reviewer is here grateful for the remarks of John Peter Wild in his Introduction (xv): ‘The prime distinction [between Roman and medieval and later clothing construction] was pointed out by Hero Granger-Taylor in 1982 [Textile History, 3–25]: most Roman clothing was woven to shape on the loom and required minimal [sewing]’. This circumstance also affects our understanding of the terminology. Larsson Lovén's vestifica cannot have been ‘tailoring clothes’; she must actually have been weaving them.

Papers by Manuel Albaladejo Vivero and Isabella Bender-Weber illustrate similar difficulties with the descriptions of textiles being traded, respectively in the Periplus Maris Erythraei and the Edict of Diocletian. Both authors rush in with English translations even though, as yet, no satisfactory dictionary definitions exist for the majority of relevant terms. A better understanding will require matching the descriptions with the relevant class of object among the textile finds.

New documentary evidence is represented by Ivan Radman-Livaja's article on inscribed lead tags from Siscia in Pannonia, modern Sisak in Croatia. Partially published before, the complete group of 1,200 Siscia tags formed the basis of Radman-Livaja's PhD dissertation (Paris, 2010) and subsequent monograph (Zagreb, 2012). Radman-Livaja follows Egger in believing that most tags of this sort relate to the fulling industry. However he is undecided about the meaning of the much abbreviated information they bear. Gostenčnik, who discusses similar tags from Noricum, presents a more straightforward account while admitting the difficulties. Of the 900 names of ‘clients’ Radman-Livaja has found on the Siscia tags (Gostenčnik's ‘customers’ is surely a better term) more than 40 per cent are female (94). Since fullers cleaned and ‘finished’ textile items that had just been woven as well as those that had become dirty through use, I would suggest that a proportion of these names belong to the women weavers.

A common theme in the book, surely correct, is that females were responsible for the core tasks in creating textiles of wool, that is to say, spinning and weaving (on the evidence of spindles in burials, Sanna Lipkin convincingly argues that girls learnt to spin at a young age) but that they very rarely appear in the written record. Males and the peripheral tasks performed by them (usually involving water) are much better documented.

Jinyu Liu has assembled documentation for groups of men involved in the textile trade. Here the written information deals more with the social activities of these men and leaves unclear much about their merchandise, particularly centones, the stock of the centonarii. In this context, it is a pleasure to be able to draw attention to the fragments of several kentrones (the Greek term is more illustrative) found at the site of Didymoi in Egypt and published in Hélène Cuvigny (ed.), Didymoi: une garnison romaine dans le désert oriental d'Égypte (2011), I, 276–81. The Didymoi fragments are of various qualities and combinations of materials but all consist of layers of patches coarsely quilted together. Being thick and principally of wool, which is poorly flammable, these recycled products would also have been effective in putting out fires.