Ostensibly a guide to Roman buckles and military fittings, this publication actually comprises two different books with very different aims and scope. The first section, up to the end of the third century, by Appels, is an overview of a wide range of military fittings and equipment from the earlier Roman period, including horse gear, armour, belt fittings, and weapons. Broad chronological trends are described and well-established typologies noted, though these are not explained in any detail. References to typologies are given, however, so that the reader can pursue the subject further if interested. Essentially this section covers the same ground as other general books on Roman military equipment, for instance Bishop and Coulston's Roman Military Equipment from the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome (1993).

The second section of the book reflects Laycock's close interest in late Roman buckles and belt fittings, and is chiefly a very detailed description of types of buckles and belt fittings found in Britain. Established typologies are not referred to in the text; instead, the author uses his own descriptive classification, based mainly on the type of zoomorphic decoration decorating the buckle terminals — for instance, ‘horsehead’, ‘dolphin’, etc. — terms which would be recognisable to other specialists, though some of his terminology is more idiosyncratic, for instance ‘dragon’ buckle. Because of the way the classification is organised, some artefacts belong in two different categories simultaneously.

An attempt is made to interpret the material by noting stylistic features — for instance supposedly ‘Celtic’ elements — and by correlating the distribution of particular types with Iron-Age ‘tribal’ areas. While in my view these interpretations are very speculative, the author has mapped out a genuinely interesting and previously undocumented phenomenon, namely, the existence of huge variation within late Roman belt buckles found in Britain and evident divergence from their Continental prototypes, implying the existence of a number of workshops with very localised production and distribution making insular types of buckle in the very late or post-Roman period. Given this, some distribution maps would be very useful to give an idea of the numbers of objects concerned, and exact spatial occurrence of some of the variants described — i.e. the hard evidence on which the text depends. It would also be preferable for parallels, both in the British and the Continental material, to be cited more exactly, rather than by vague mention of sites, and established typologies need to be used to set the variants in context; in fact the material needs to be treated in a much more scholarly way than is actually evident. Understandably there is a tension here between the remit of a popular identification guide, in which clear descriptions of types or variants set within, or related to, previously established frameworks, are all that is required, and the wish of the author to document and suggest some interpretation of the large number of new variants which he has discovered. As a result Section 2 meets neither of these aims satisfactorily, but certainly makes clear what an important contribution metal-detected finds can potentially make. Disappointingly, however, there is no mention in the book of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the established voluntary system for the recording and identification of metal-detected finds in England and Wales (http://www.finds.org.uk).

Overall the work is poorly edited, as the lack of homogenisation described above already implies. The photographs are of rather variable quality and mostly only show one view of the artefact. Site locations for the illustrated objects are given only in Section 2, though even here without further reference to a source database or publication. Referencing and bibliographic details are non-standardised in format and contain some errors. A bibliography indicates the range of sources that both authors have drawn upon in their work, though this does not include the references in the first section of the text, and seems mainly to relate to Section 2. The book supplements published catalogues and other material in some ways, but, particularly in Section 2, does not refer adequately to the extant literature, and will be of limited usefulness as a stand-alone resource.