The 22nd Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference was held at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main between 29 March and 1 April 2012. It was the first time that the conference was organised in Germany and only the second time that it was held on the Continent (the 18th TRAC Conference was held in Amsterdam). TRAC 2012 hosted eight thematic and two general sessions and in total 55 papers were delivered; only 12 were selected for publication.

Compared to the TRAC 2011 proceedings, in which many papers focused on Roman Britain (5 of 12 articles in TRAC 2011 focused on Roman Britain; TRAC 2006: 6 out of 13; TRAC 2004: 5 out of 13; TRAC 2003: 7 out of 12 and TRAC 2002: 4 out of 11), the TRAC 2012 proceedings comprise a wide range of different subjects from different areas. But as with previous proceedings, the issue of ‘Romanisation’ remained at the centre of attention: 5 (Calapà, Roth, Ingate, Barrier and Garland) out of 12 papers deal with this subject.

Anguissola's paper on structural supports in Roman marble statuary argues that supports did not only serve stabilising functions, but were an aesthetic choice of each sculptor or workshop realising their own interpretation or compositional strategy. Gilhaus's paper on Thamugadi and Lepcis Magna re-examines why self-representation changed in the third century. He proposes that public benefactions were performed mainly by local ėlites, since the imperial ėlite (i.e. senators and equites) in these towns focused mainly on private representation. Calapàs gives detailed insights into transformations in religious life in Volsinii Veteres (Orvieto) and Volsinii Novi (Bolsena). She discusses the epigraphical and written sources but sadly almost no archaeological evidence. Roth discusses changes in south and central Italy from the fourth to the third centuries b.c. by comparing urban centres of the Graeco-Roman and Etruscan costal lowlands with the tribally organised Samnite and Lucanian towns in the interior. Roth tests theories of Romanisation against the ‘internal frontier development’ approach from I. Kopytoff (developed on the basis of Sub-Saharan African tribes) and stresses the importance of social mobility between these different urban centres.

Three papers were chosen from a session on Roman neighbourhood relations: those by Viitanen, Nissinen and Korhonen on street activities, by Ynnilä on neighbourhood relations, and Proudfoot on secondary doors in entranceways of Roman houses. All re-examine earlier research on social relations in public and private spaces in Pompeii. Mol's paper employs Heidegger's Thing theory to discuss an alabaster statue of the Egyptian god Horus found in the peristyle shrine in the Casa degli Amorini Dorati.

Garland's paper discusses ritual and mortuary landscapes from 55 b.c. to a.d. 43 on the southern coast of Britain and in riverside towns in northern Gaul. Ingate questions the label of ‘Romanisation’ for interpreting structures of Roman towns in the provinces while Pinto and Pinto discuss Galli and the Catterick Transvestite and argue for a more careful use of conceptual categories such as transgender and transsexual. However, they miss some important literature on the subject, e.g. Dupont and Eloi, L'érotisme masculin dans la Rome antique (2001). Barrier takes a statistical approach to analyse Gaulish fineware using the ‘Romanisation index’ (on a scale of 1 to 100). The maps, charts and illustrations of factor analysis, as well as the clear structure, make her arguments very convincing.

With a total of 220 pages, the TRAC 2012 proceedings are one of the longest published so far. Almost all of the 12 papers present a large amount of material (often whole chapters of the authors' PhD theses); in many cases a reduction would have helped to make the results and conclusions clearer. Additionally, some papers are difficult to understand because they lack maps and charts (Calapà, Gilhaus, Roth). One of the most appealing aspects of TRAC 2012 lies in the fact that different scholarly traditions are united within the same volume. This is in part because in 2012 more authors, most of them PhD students or postdoctoral scholars, came from different international backgrounds (more than half of them had no UK university affiliations; a more international background was pledged in earlier TRAC volumes: see preface TRAC 2010 by D. Mladenovic and B. Russel). There is a huge difference in the application of theoretical frameworks between authors in tune with Anglophone research and authors connected to German, French and Italian traditions. Some papers apply a complex theoretical framework (especially Roth, Mol, Ingate) while others (Gilhaus, Calapà, Anguissola) apply none. One wonders why papers that apply no theoretical approach have been published in this series, even if Anguissola's paper proves that one does not always need to focus on theory to deconstruct old ideas.