Over twenty years have passed since the appearance of the third edition of Barry Cunliffe's Roman Bath Discovered, the last major popular book on one of the most important Roman sites in Britain. Since then, ongoing developer-funded and rescue excavations in the town have added significantly to our knowledge of the extramural areas in particular, and Bath is unquestionably overdue for a general-audience account. Peter Davenport, at the centre of Bath archaeology for almost forty years, is an obvious and expert guide to our current state of understanding.

Roman Bath is essentially a site of two parts: the monumentalised (later walled) sanctuary zone centred on the King's Spring and the temple to Sulis Minerva, and the extramural urban settlement which grew up to the north of the sanctuary, centred on the Bathwick crossing of the River Avon and spreading south down modern-day Walcot Street. Scholarship (including my own) has largely focused on the former, and one of the great strengths of Davenport's richly illustrated and engaging book is the lively and comprehensive introduction it gives to our increasingly extensive evidence for the latter. The bulk of the book is structured chronologically, opening with an interesting and evocative discussion of the geology of the hot springs and their probable pre-Roman appearance, before progressing on to our (still tantalisingly ephemeral) evidence for a Julio-Claudian army presence at the Bathwick crossing. The chapters that follow take us from the first-century a.d. monumentalisation of the area around the hot springs and the contemporaneous establishment of the early town to the mid second-century expansion and reorganisation of the monumental zone, accompanied by the growth and consolidation of the settlement. The headline argument here is that the mysterious monumental building long known to lie under Bath Abbey was in fact a theatre: the theory, while still tentative, is both plausible and attractive. Davenport then takes us on a tour of the people of Roman Bath, as seen through the epigraphy, curse tablets and limited skeletal evidence, before turning to the surrounding countryside, where we see a high concentration of villas in the vicinity of Aquae Sulis from the late third century onwards. Overall, Davenport's vision of Roman Bath, and particularly of the sanctuary zone, is of a place which had the sustained interest of the Roman authorities from the first century onwards – indeed, can be conceived of as ‘part of an estate administered by the imperial authorities by an essentially military civil service’ (p. 176). The hand of Roman imperialism is certainly visible in the early stages, but I find some of the later claims less convincing – e.g. that the centurio regionarius recorded on RIB 152 was based at the supposed imperial estate centred at Combe Down, or that fourth-century alterations to the Baths are due to a further influx of imperial officials.

The book concludes by charting changes to the monumental centre in the third and early fourth centuries, followed by the slow abandonment of the temple precinct and baths in the later fourth and early fifth centuries. A brief afterword gives a clear and concise run-down of the history of excavation and discovery in the town from the antiquarian period to the present day.

Davenport does a superb job of bringing to life our evidence for ‘ordinary’ Aquae Sulis as an increasingly prosperous and diverse community, and also of conjuring up a vivid image of the famous Baths in particular, guiding the reader through our complicated architectural evidence for the latter's development with clarity and ease. The handling of questions of religion and of Romanisation can be a little more heavy-handed. The floor burials, for instance, of a lamb and a neonate in a first-century domestic context are hard to justify as evidence for a ‘lararium, such as would be found in any Romanised domus’ (p. 95). General-audience books must naturally simplify academic debates, but the presentation can feel a little out of keeping with current thought, e.g. with ‘Romanised’ often implicitly treated as ‘more civilised’, and a definite focus on the Roman authorities as agents for change. These quibbles notwithstanding, Roman Bath: A New History and Archaeology of Aquae Sulis will now deservedly stand as our most up-to-date and accessible introduction to the town and people of Aquae Sulis, written by one of the best possible guides to the evidence.