Review: [untitled]Author(s): Paul BoothReviewed work(s):

The Archaeology of Roman Towns: Studies in Honour of John S. Wacher by P. WilsonSource: Britannia, Vol. 35 (2004), pp. 366-367Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4128652Accessed: 06/12/2008 11:14

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sprs.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Britannia.

http://www.jstor.org

366 REVIEWS

The Archaeology of Roman Towns: Studies in Honour of John S. Wacher. Edited by P. Wilson. Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2003. Pp. xviii + 269, illus. Price: ?60.00. ISBN 1 8421 7103 8.

As the editor notes in his foreword, the 'slightly eclectic mix' of the papers in this festschrift is 'entirely appropriate' in view of its recipient's range of interests. Preceded by an appreciation of John Wacher (by Alan McWhirr) and a bibliography of his works, the twenty-six papers include eight on non-British subjects. The editor has avoided any thematic grouping of papers by arranging them in alphabetical order of contributor. Broadly, they include four papers - three town-specific pieces - on urban defences (Esmonde Cleary on Gaul, Crummy on Colchester, Magilton on Chichester, Manning on Caerwent); nine that may be described as 'Wacheresque' summaries of individual towns (including Ancyra (Bennett), Nijmegen (van Enckevort and Thijssen) and Nicopolis (Poulter), and three 'small towns'); three regional or provincial overviews - the Lower Rhine (Carroll), Dalmatia (Wilkes), and Yorkshire (P. Wilson); and ten more heterogeneous contributions mostly on specific aspects of individual towns, such as M. Jones and T. Williams on aspects of water supply at Lincoln and London respectively and Webster on the contribution of artefact studies to a number of questions at Caerwent, but including wider-ranging pieces on urban tabularia and the sorts of documents that might have been contained within them (Hassall) and (monumental) urban art (Ferris). Clearly treatment of such a wide-ranging collection can only be very selective.

The individual town summaries provide useful information, though a number of the sites in question (as disparate as Carlisle, Shepton Mallet, and Nicopolis) have been the subject of recent major publications and/or syntheses (as have Colchester, Lincoln, and Catterick, aspects of which are dealt with in other contributions). Overall, much of what is presented emphasises report rather than broader analysis. Within this framework a number of well-established preoccupations emerge - urban defences, for example, clearly a topic far from being exhausted. Refinement of sequence and chronology is still a major issue in the papers here (Crummy, Magilton, and Manning on Colchester, Chichester, and Caerwent respectively - the last two of these are reviewed thoroughly and shown to lie broadly within increasingly well-understood patterns of development), while Esmonde Cleary presents a useful summary of early urban defences in the West (meaning Britain, the Gauls, the Germanies, and Raetia). His principal conclusion, that 'under the high empire urban defences in the west were much more to do with urban status and civic ambition than with defence' is plausible for the first and early second centuries A.D., but less convincing in the later second century, when the numerous British earthwork defences still appear remarkable - why is it that such 'ambition' is apparently much more widespread here than in Gaul, where so many major towns are not defended at all in this period?

Interesting questions relating to the composition of urban populations emerge particularly from the contributions on Nijmegen and Nicopolis, both of which had substantial 'foreign' components, in the latter case explained by the lack of 'an appropriate tribal organization upon which to graft an urban structure' (205), an interesting contrast to the situation prevailing across lowland Britain. At Nijmegen we see not only a multiplicity of locations and types of military sites but also a variety of civil settlement locations of apparently contrasting character. In particular, in the first century A.D. van Enckevort and Thijssen suggest that there were parallel settlements of Batavians in Batavodurum and non-Batavians in oppidum Batavorum - mostly 'Gallo-Roman craftsmen, officials, soldiers/veterans, innkeepers and other immigrants' (64). This striking situation, identified principally on the basis of archaeological evidence without the supporting epigraphic material adduced at Nicopolis (but how much significance should be placed on the absence of early inscriptions recording Thracians?), might have implications for Britain, particularly at places such as London, but could also find parallels in Colchester and elsewhere.

An important area of study indicated by the Nijmegen review that is echoed in a number of the British- based papers relates to the complexities of military/civil interaction, e.g. at Carlisle (McCarthy), Richborough (Millett and Wilmott), early Caerwent (Webster) to an extent, and the Yorkshire towns (P. Wilson). Millett and Wilmott emphasise the symbolic significance of Richborough as the principal port of entry into Britain in the early Roman period and (rightly) the fact that this would not have involved a few isolated monuments; on-going work indicates the scale and complexity of the extramural settlement. Here and elsewhere straightforward military/non-military dichotomies will not do, as the recent detailed discussion of Catterick has shown. The circumstances and social and economic framework in which particular activities took place need to be defined on a priori grounds. How did different communities, whether (for example) a small group of soldiers within a 'town', or a 'civilian' community attached to a fort, see themselves in a wider settlement context, and how do archaeologists identify the degree of interdependence of these communities?

P. Wilson's contribution on Yorkshire 'towns' probably comes closest to discussion of some of these issues.

REVIEWS 367

Overall, however, few contributions really begin to get to grips with what urban living meant and how it was understood by the people who lived in towns - surely we should be able to begin to use the archaeological evidence in this way? Ferris tries, but his conclusion that 'truly urban art ... did not ... become ... part of the fabric of the city [in Britain]' (92) confirms what one might have suspected. Williams, in an illuminating survey of aspects of water supply in London, is more successful. Variation in the quantity and quality of data is inevitably problematic, but recent increases in both at Leicester are summarised very usefully by Cooper and Buckley, who favour an extended chronology for the late Roman phases there. In contrast, Neal provides a neat deconstruction of the famous Verulamium Insula XXVII Building 2 'late Roman' sequence by suggesting a probable later third-century A.D. date for mosaics hitherto assigned to a building constructed after A.D. 360. The building sequence may not have outlasted the mid- to late (at latest) fourth century A.D.

Such essays depend, as Neal acknowledges, upon the quality of published or archived excavation records. The contributions on the London water supply and Leicester are particularly useful as they deploy large quantities of 'grey' literature, some from sites that will probably never be 'published' in the traditional sense. The sheer volume of evidence now available merely underlines the achievement of Wacher's Towns. The approach in some of the other contributions is much more broad-brush, an extreme example being that of Wilkes on the towns of Dalmatia. This province-wide survey principally deploys historical/epigraphic sources and therefore provides much information on the legal status of towns but, perhaps unavoidably because of scale, leaves little impression of the broad trends of their development, what they looked like, and how they actually worked. We get a much better sense of this from sites such as Nijmegen, Nicopolis, London, and (inevitably) the small discussed sample of Pompeii (R. Jones and Schoonhoven), in which the chronological development of distinctions between high-status and low-status housing areas can be traced in some detail.

It is perhaps unfair to criticise the volume for failing to address questions that were not directly within its remit. Overall, despite a few lapses and some editorial untidiness, it contains much that is useful and sufficient, better still, that is thought-provoking. As such it forms a fine tribute to John Wacher and his work in this field.

Oxford Archaeology PAUL BOOTH

Article Contentsp. 366p. 367

Issue Table of ContentsBritannia, Vol. 35 (2004), pp. i-x+1-383Volume Information [pp. 371-383]Front Matter [pp. ii-x]Editorial [pp. VII-VIII]Vespasian, Auctoritas and Britain [pp. 1-8]Early Roman Mosaic Materials in Southern Britain, with Particular Reference to Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum): A Regional Geological Perspective [pp. 9-38]Turkdean Roman Villa, Gloucestershire: Archaeological Investigations 1997-1998 [pp. 39-76]The North Leigh Roman Villa: Its Plan Reviewed [pp. 77-113]The Roman Fort at Colwyn Castle, Powys (Radnorshire) [pp. 115-120]Auxiliary Barracks in a New Light: Recent Discoveries on Hadrian's Wall [pp. 121-157]Geophysical Survey of the Vicus at Birdoswald Roman Fort, Cumbria [pp. 159-178]A Roman Bath-House at Duntocher on the Antonine Wall [pp. 179-224]NotesThe Haverfield Bequest: A Further Note [p. 225]Two Hairpins from Surrey [pp. 225-228]The God Silvanus Callirius and RIB 194, from Colchester [pp. 228-229]A Possible Date for the Silchester Roman 'Church' [pp. 229-233]Britons and Saxons on the Eastern Boundary of the Civitas Durotrigum [pp. 234-240]A Possible Name for a Landowner at Brading Villa [pp. 240-244]C.L. in the Titulature of the Coh. II Tungrorum [pp. 244-248]A Roman Fort at St Asaph and the Location of Varis [pp. 248-252]

Roman Britain in 2003 [pp. 253-349]ReviewsReview: untitled [p. 351]Review: untitled [pp. 351-352]Review: untitled [pp. 352-353]Review: untitled [pp. 353-354]Review: untitled [pp. 354-355]Review: untitled [pp. 355-356]Review: untitled [p. 357]Review: untitled [p. 358]Review: untitled [pp. 358-359]Review: untitled [pp. 359-360]Review: untitled [p. 360]Review: untitled [pp. 360-361]Review: untitled [pp. 361-363]Review: untitled [pp. 363-364]Review: untitled [p. 364]Review: untitled [p. 365]Review: untitled [pp. 366-367]

Proceedings of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 2003-4 [pp. 369-370]Back Matter