For much of the period during which Roman Britain has been studied, implicit assumptions and grand narratives have prevailed, suggests Adam Rogers. As an antidote, he argues for a biographical approach which attempts to combine the analysis of objects, people, sites and landscapes into a more holistic account of everyday, socially situated experience, sensitive to aspects of change and continuity, both chronologically and geographically. He sets an ambitious target, but in the view of this reader, the remainder of the book stands as a manifesto for action, rather than making a substantive contribution to our interpretation of Roman Britain.

Following a couple of introductory chapters that set out the ‘biographical’ approach, chapters are thematically arranged, examining people, settlements, and objects and materials. In each, a critique of conventional approaches is followed by an attempt to consider more localised site perspectives and identities by discussing brief examples. Certainly some useful points are made in the critiques. There is a worthwhile argument to be had about what we both gain and lose by aggregating data and placing them in artificial, constructed categories, and how we may be able to benefit from taking a less interventionist approach, more sensitive to the individuality of particular sites and their histories. R. argues convincingly, for instance, that the term ‘small town’ is not a very useful category, since it is used to denote sites that actually show very wide variety and not many similarities with each other. He also reminds us that we need to be more alert to the changes in character that will inevitably have occurred during any site's history of occupation. Yet the examples that are used to demonstrate the potential of more holistic, localised interpretations generally remain at the level of interesting suggestions rather than sustained analyses. In the ‘objects and materials’ chapter, for instance, some thoughtful points are made regarding the use of different materials and their associated textures and other sensory qualities, but the examples given are rather brief and there are not even any illustrations of materials or objects to show us the kinds of surface textures and other features that the author is interested in. It would also be useful if more careful distinctions were made between genuinely regional and local site features and those that occur more widely. Some trends seem to be discussed as examples of regionally specific behaviour, but actually occur much more widely, for instance, the replacement of pottery cups with glass drinking vessels in the late Roman period. In addition, the most detailed case studies tend to be drawn from the author's own previously published work and so do not represent substantial new data analysis.

The book would also have benefited from a more interventionist editorial approach. A section on epigraphic sources in ch. 2 lapses strangely into a consideration of the archaeology of Hadrian's Wall, and sites and monuments record data, which surely belong under the later subheading ‘excavation and reconstructions’. There are also occasional problems with sentence construction and readability of the text.

Biography is well known to be a tricky format. How to fill in those lacunae in the subject's life created by the inevitable problems wth evidence? The usual remedy is to resort to an authorial voice in which the biographer speculates imaginatively, but with an air of authority, about the subject's situation, feelings, motives, and so on. It would be too harsh to propose that the same is true of this book, but similarities certainly exist, in the way that the author makes suggestions about what ‘must have been’ or what ‘might have been’ when attempting to broaden our consideration of sites to include the everyday experiences and perceptions of their inhabitants. Though the aims of this book are laudable, in order to convince the reader that the ‘biographical approach’ extends beyond the consideration of undocumented experience as an imaginative exercise, more detailed and in-depth case studies are needed, that make a sustained, evidence-based argument for the diversity of experiences and perspectives that existed at any one time and place in the past of Roman Britain.