F.'s copiously illustrated short book (169 colour images, including antiquarian records, artefact photographs, excavation plans and reconstruction drawings) on the greenfield site of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) presents an easily digestible history of excavations, chronological narrative of the settlement from the late Iron Age to the early medieval period and F.'s explanations for the town's origin, growth, changes and decline. For those teaching or beginning to study Roman towns in Britain, the volume joins a handful of other relatively recent books that provide condensed syntheses of the several centuries of development in late pre-Roman Iron Age oppida and Roman-period urban centres in Britain, such as R. Hingley's Londinium: a Biography (2018), M. Jones's Roman Lincoln (2011) and Oxbow's Urban Archaeological Assessment series, including volumes on St Albans (R. Niblett and I. Thompson [2005]), Bath (E. La Trobe-Bateman and R. Niblett [2015]) and Colchester (A. Gascoyne and D. Radford [2013]).
The publisher is Windgather Press, the public-audience arm of Oxbow, and the book is therefore orientated towards the knowledgeable public (i.e. presented without academic context, citations or bibliography), but also serves an academic audience as a punchy introduction to the town (including very recent discoveries) and to F.'s own perspective. Reviewing this book in an academic journal for an academic audience may be inappropriate, and I direct those holding this view to N. Holbrook's review in Current Archaeology (August 2021). Researchers who might be frustrated in seeking to use the volume as a starting point for further inquiry should look first to J. Creighton with R. Fry's Silchester: Changing Visions of a Roman Town (2016), which presents a longer and fully referenced synthesis and analysis of excavations, surveys and interpretations of the town (NB: Fulford et al., Late Iron Age Calleva [2018] and Fulford et al., Silchester Insula IX: the Claudio-Neronian Occupation of the Iron Age Oppidum [2020] have been published since).
Famously, Silchester was the site of a nineteen-year campaign (1890–1909) by the Society of Antiquaries, primarily to excavate stone structures, which resulted in the now-familiar plan of the town wall, streets and buildings with significant gaps between them. Until Creighton with Fry 2016, the synthetic work was G.C. Boon's 1974 Silchester, a revision of his 1957 Roman Silchester. F.'s excavations at Silchester began in 1974, marking an era of systematic, stratigraphic excavation and recording, alongside the application of scientific methods, in his major excavations in the forum (1980–1986), Insula IX (1997–2014) and the public baths (2018–ongoing). Along with Creighton's Silchester Mapping Project (2005–2010), F.'s work has transformed our understanding of the town, and this book succinctly describes and illustrates results of excavations that have been published separately across a large number of books and articles. We now know that Silchester displays the earliest known urban characteristics in Britain, including dense settlement and a grid of streets from before the Claudian invasion.
For those readers seeking an introduction to Silchester, who may have previously turned to Boon 1974, Silchester Revealed offers a plethora of new information on and evidence for: the late Iron Age town; structural change over time; the presence of timber structures pre-dating and contemporaneous with masonry buildings; as well as continental contacts, ethnicity, health, diet, belief and so forth derived from systematic and scientific study of artefacts, deposits, and faunal and environmental data. F. begins (Chapter 1: ‘Discovering Calleva’) by describing the history of inquiry at Silchester since W. Stukeley. The subsequent chapters follow a roughly chronological presentation of evidence, beginning with the late pre-Roman Iron Age and the suggestion that the town was founded by immigrants from Gaul, facilitated or permitted by the Roman military across the Channel, as one of a network of entrepôts (Canterbury, Chichester, Colchester/Camulodunum and St Albans/Verulamium) created to enable trade with the Roman world (Chapter 2: ‘Beginnings: the Late Iron Age Royal Centre of Calleva’). Chapter 3, ‘Caratacus, the Roman Conquest, Nero and Calleva’, describes the mid first-century ce town as it developed following the annexation of Britannia, where F. suggests that power in the town passed from a British king to the Roman military, to a client king and finally into imperial hands. Chapter 4, ‘From Town to City: Calleva, a Regional Centre’, presents the Flavian growth into a more recognisable urban centre, and F. suggests that the ‘imperial estate’ at Calleva was sold off and the proceeds used to construct the street grid and new buildings, like the timber forum basilica. Chapter 5, ‘The 2nd Century: Calleva at its Peak’, offers evidence for the height of urbanisation and the possible economic basis of the town. Chapter 6, ‘Calleva Defended’, is a shorter chapter describing the construction of the late second-century ditches and rampart and late third-century city walls, which he suggests could have been constructed because Calleva may have been a stronghold of one or both of the usurpers, Carausius and Allectus, during the breakaway Gallic Empire. Chapter 7, ‘Late Roman Calleva’, and Chapter 8, ‘Living in Late Roman Calleva’, form a pair describing life (drawing on artefacts and environmental data) and structures in the town in the third and fourth centuries, including the putative ‘church’, elaborated townhouses and smaller timber buildings. The book concludes with Chapter 9, ‘The End’, a discussion of disuse and relative abandonment of the town in the post-Roman period. Throughout, the emphasis is on F.'s excavations, from where the most detailed evidence derives, offering readers an introduction to and overview of the extensive published reports of these areas.
Despite the choice of publisher and the intended audience, the book makes bold interpretations that interweave the literary and historical narratives, Roman military initiatives, political motivations and archaeological evidence – an interpretative method with a strong legacy of proponents and opponents – some of which I have highlighted in the summary. This aspect of the book will be of great interest to an academic audience, although the text avoids engagement with academic debates (for this, see Creighton with Fry 2016, Chapter 17: ‘Calleva: Historical and Archaeological Narratives’). Nonetheless, reviewing F.'s specific arguments from an academic perspective, on the basis of the abbreviated content presented in Silchester Revealed, would be to misunderstand the book's intended purpose. While academic readers might wish for more information, engagement with debate and contextualisation, doing so would have doubled the length of the book and fundamentally altered its character. Other authors might place greater emphasis on agency and power among indigenous leaders and communities as well as on social networks that united groups on either side of the Channel, and de-emphasise the significance of the Roman military and imperial administration to urbanisation and social change in British oppida and civitas capitals. Nonetheless, the intended audience is clear, and the avoidance of references to other writers’ ideas is consistent throughout. Academic readers who require more information can turn to F.'s detailed excavation reports (e.g. Fulford and J.R. Timby [2000], Fulford et al. [2018], Fulford et al. [2020]) and numerous other publications, which are listed in the bibliography of Creighton with Fry (2016).
This engaging book presents F.'s ideas alongside the excavated evidence, in short order and with ample, high-quality illustration. It offers a huge wealth of interpretations to compare to other authors and towns and a significant jumping-off point for discussion.
