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The Positioning of the Roman Imperial Legions . By J.H. Farnum. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1458. Archaeopress, Oxford, 2005. Pp. 121, maps. Price: £26.00. ISBN 978 1 84171 896 5.

the volume, dealing with what appears to have been a specialised settlement exploiting the rich wetland resources of the Fenland. Having been preserved beneath a layer of alluvium, it is claimed to be ‘amongst the best-preserved later prehistoric settlements to be excavated within Britain’, and the surviving floor surfaces and wealth of artefactual and palaeoenvironmental evidence certainly bear this out. A more rigorous editing of the subsequent chapter, on other evidence for the Iron Age landscape, could, however, have made for a more coherent discussion. The rest of the volume deals with the Roman period, notably a Romano-British shrine complex built on top of one of the Bronze Age barrows in the first century a.d., enclosed by a ditch in the second century, dismantled in the third century, and re-established in the fourth century (ch. 7). Ch. 8 pulls together fragmentary evidence for the wider Roman-period landscape, and includes some important, albeit small-scale, work on other extensive cropmark complexes, comprising settlements, trackways and field-systems, that are so characteristic of the Fenland islands and fen-edge in the Roman period. While the results of the fieldwork reported here are placed in their immediate context by comparing their results with those from earlier surveys of the area, there is no wider discussion of the significance of the results. Ch. 9 deals with ‘The Landscape of “Improvement”: Post-Medieval Times’, while the volume concludes with a discussion of ‘Reclamations: Communities in the Level’. This provides an interesting discussion but could really have done with far greater contextualisation within the wider Fenland landscape, which is after all one of the most intensively investigated in Britain (and for which some key texts are noticeably absent from the bibliography). Whilst there is much of interest in this report, it is not easy to read. Specialist contributions are fragmented and distributed throughout the chapters, and in places there is little logic to the structure. In Ch. 5, for example, there are specialist reports on the ‘Iron Age pottery’ and ‘Wooden artefacts’ (so far so good), followed by a discussion of ‘Material culture: sets and assemblages’, and then further specialist reports — ‘Fired clay’ (including loomweights), ‘Worked and unworked stone’, ‘Slags’, and ‘Small finds’ with yet more fired clay artefacts (including a slingshot): if there is a logic to the structure it was lost on this reader. There are numerous editorial lapses and while individually these could be overlooked, cumulatively they make this is a difficult volume to use. Some illustrations are poorly labelled, and/or contain information that is not explained in a key or caption. The text in ch. 1, for example, makes frequent reference to the ‘Snows Farm’ complex, but it is not labelled on figs 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, which simply refer to ‘Upper Delphs’ (we have to wait until fig. 2.2 for ‘Snows Farm’ to be labelled). The ‘Introduction’, while an intellectually stimulating discussion of the issues surrounding the study of wetland-edge landscapes, does not actually introduce the project and this particular landscape very well for readers who might not be familiar with it. Overall, there is much of interest in this volume, if one is prepared to spend some time finding it. There are some important data for the study of the Fenland and indeed Roman Britain as a whole, but it is mostly up to the reader to make of it what they will. There is much stimulating discussion of issues related to the study of landscape, but also many examples of the problems posed by publishing the results of a large-scale landscape project some twenty years after the fieldwork finished.