D.F. MACKRETH. Brooches in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain. xiv+437 pages, 152 illustrations, 2 volumes, CD-ROM. 2011. Oxford: Oxbow; 978-1-84217-411-1 hardback £70.
LINDSAY ALLASON-JONES (ed.). Artefacts in Roman Britain: their purpose and use. xviii+356 pages, 80 illustrations. 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-52-86012-3 hardback £50; 978-0-521-67752-3 paperback £18.99.
On the face of it these are two very different publications, both, in their own ways, excellent examples of the best of British Antiquarianism.
Mackreth is a well-respected brooch specialist who has published over many years and this impressive two-volume work is in the best of British archaeological cataloguing traditions. A truly impressive work that brings together a vast corpus of material synthesised into what must be the definitive work on the subject for anyone wishing to identify and date brooches. The prologue provides confirmation of the background; the archaeology of the early 1960s and the continuation of attempts to classify all manner of archaeological material into typologies of shape and form; the necessary first steps in making sense out of the "things which our ancestors, quite rightly, threw away" (p. 4). Archaeology has yet to fully go through the experiences of the 'New Archaeology' of the 1960s, of processualism and post-processualism and today probably post-post processualism. The stated aim of the catalogue is straight-forward; to establish proper date ranges for brooches from Late Pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA) and Roman sites in Britain. The brooches are categorised on the basis of shape, technical aspects of the pin assembly and other clearly observable features such as styles and materials of decoration (although the identification is never confirmed by analysis). There is a brief introduction that discusses such matters as selection biases and the materials and manufacture of brooches but the majority of the work is taken up by the catalogue of over 15 000 brooches. Following the catalogue is a final chapter (11) that looks at the use of the Bow Brooch and a commentary on the development of later brooch types.
In volume 2, over 2100 brooches are illustrated and thus this work provides an invaluable resource for identification of the myriad differing styles. In the catalogue each entry includes a reference to the relevant plate, a list of the brooches in the category and a list of these by site and date allocation. This is followed by a brief commentary setting out the argument for the chronology and ending with a slightly esoteric indication of distribution. This is a vast repository of primary data recording the changes in style of Romano-British brooches and how this relates to date and region. Interpretation is restricted to the rather brief final chapter where some thought is given to the wearers of the brooches, in particular the suggestion that specific types of brooch were worn by Roman soldiers as signifiers of the Legions in which they served (pp. 236–9). The use of brooch distributions in support of the contention that brooches were indicators of unit affiliation, however, is not strong, as Mackreth himself makes clear (p. 236), and the distributional evidence, confined as it is to Britain, provides only part of the picture. Mackreth comments that the XIV GEMINA appears to have had a fondness for the Aucissa type fibula on the basis of distribution; it is however clear that other legions, stationed elsewhere in the empire, also wore this type of brooch. The X FRETENSIS left brooches predominantly of the Aucissa type at the siege of Masada in Israel in AD 74 (over 60 per cent) and brooches of this type occur with military associations at many other locations. A more productive way forward would be to see the brooches as part of a larger package of material culture and it is this approach that is presented in the second book under discussion.
Allason-Jones's edited volume is essentially a textbook introduction into a selection of the main artefact types found on Romano-British sites. Brooches are, of course covered, but as a part of the much greater array of items of personal decoration. This 'broad-brush' approach suits the different aims of a publication that, as the title clearly states, is concerned with "purpose and use" rather than the study of a particular artefact type in isolation. The volume consists of a series of thirteen chapters, each dealing with an aspect of Romano-British life and specifically the artefacts related to this. Thus Richard Brickstock's contribution on commerce obviously includes coinage, but also weights and measures. Nina Crummy's chapter on travel and transport contains everything from footwear to chariot fittings and boats. Medical equipment is discussed by Ralph Jackson alongside bathing accoutrements and cosmetic sets, providing a fascinating insight into medicine and personal hygiene. Swift's chapter considers all types of personal ornament (including brooches as already mentioned); it describes an array of artefact types and discusses how these were used and how we know. The relationship between artefacts used as personal adornment and expressions of identity and belonging are also investigated and the dangers of "constructed identities" revealed (p. 215). Thus the subjective nature of artefact use (and discard) is exposed in this and other chapters; artefact assemblages tell us about how the individuals wanted to be perceived, not what or who they really were. This is perhaps best demonstrated through the fascinating study of Roman military equipment discussed by Mike Bishop in Chapter 5. The potential of such studies to further our understanding of the Roman soldiery within wider society and how it expressed itself as a different entity within that society opens up some interesting and welcome avenues for research. We have already seen in Mackreth's magnum opus that brooches possibly had a role in signalling a soldier's affiliation to legion or unit, although Bishop's discussion of taphonomy warns of the dangers of overly simplistic interpretations. But the idea of the Roman army as almost an ethnicity in itself, or perhaps as a series of interconnected identities, appears to find greater support when assemblages of different artefacts are considered together. Swift presents the idea of a 'constructed identity' with specific reference to burials of individual soldiers of different backgrounds who are bound together through a shared 'artefactual' ethnicity defined by dress accessories that signal a Roman military distinctiveness which appears to have taken precedence over actual ethnic identity.
There are many stimulating ideas here, well presented and articulated, that will hopefully excite current and future students and direct them to new areas of inquiry. There are inevitably differences in style and in interpretation of the brief. Bishop's overview of military equipment deals more with the 'big' questions of how military equipment can be identified and how the biases of deposition can best be tackled; there is little discussion about changes of material, style or form of specific groups of artefacts. Other chapters break their themes down into different categories; jewellery, belt-sets or toilet articles in Swift's view of personal ornament; smiths tools, quarrying tools, tools used in processing wool and cloth are some of the sections in Manning's chapter entitled 'Industry'. This is, perhaps unfairly, the least satisfying of the lot. After acknowledging something of the diversity of 'Industry' in Roman Britain the chapter limits itself to the cataloguing of iron tools, stating in the conclusion that "the artefactual evidence for industries and crafts in Roman Britain is largely limited to the metal, usually iron, tools associated with them..." (p. 88). I do not agree; surely the best evidence for Roman industry is the many pottery sherds that represent the millions of pots produced by that industry? The evidence for a copper-alloy manufacturing industry (perhaps making brooches) is the products themselves, not one or two iron anvils and a few sets of tongs, as useful as they may be for reconstructing part of the picture. Even industries processing organic materials such as leather are best studied through the evidence of the products themselves, as Bishop comments (p. 127).
One area of evidence, however, that neither book addresses is the role of scientific analysis in the study of artefacts. Mackreth tells us that there is "no need to discuss" the composition of the copper-alloys used for brooch manufacture as Bayley has already done this "more than adequately" (p. 4). Yet Bayley and Butcher (2004) clearly show how important alloy composition is, along with style and form, to a comprehensive understanding of brooches in Roman Britain; Mackreth gives us only part of the picture. It is curious how Mackreth acknowledges the distinction between iron and copper-alloy brooches as significant (for example on p. 146), yet the important distinction between brass and bronze is not even mentioned. A similar complaint can be levelled at Allason-Jones's contributors who also fail to mention the importance of understanding (or in some cases even identifying) the materials from which artefacts were made. In defence of Allason-Jones, she does mention the importance of the analysis of non-ferrous metals in her introduction (p. 7), but there is no mention of the contribution of the analysis of glass or enamel or ceramic to artefact investigation and her contributors certainly show little awareness of the value of understanding the materials of material culture. For both books, this is both a shame and a missed opportunity to move beyond the traditional limitations of artefact studies.