Welsh Journals

Iron Age and Romano-British Monuments in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England). H.M.S.O., 1976, pp. lvi+ 157 + 68 plates. Price: £ 25,00. The Inventories produced by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) and the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales are grand in their conception, works to be compared with the Oxford English Dictionary in their scale and coverage. They aim to list every known site of archaeol- ogical or historical interest from the earliest times to the 18th century. In 'Iron Age and Romano-British Monuments in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds' sites are listed by parish) "Every known site" is a tall order for the inventory. The rapid and widespread destruction of field monuments is noted as a cause of anxiety. Also, the inventory can only reflect the present state of our knowledge. Corinium (Cirencester) is still being excavated, and, though the site is treated in general terms in the preface, the list of remains is outside the scope of this volume. In addition to sites formerly or currently known disappearing under the plough or being destroyed in other ways there are sites still being discovered and investigated. Thus, while this is a definitive work for the present, a supplement- ary volume will be required in the future. This is in no way a critic- ism of the book, merely an indication that our knowledge of the subject is continually growing. New techniques are devised, and the authors pay particular attention to the use of aerial photography as an interpretative tool. They recognise, however, that the interpret- ation of aerial photographs is to some extent subjective. They have therefore included in the plates a large number of such photographs, and the reader is required to use his own judgement in examining them. The 68 plates, many of them containing several photographs, are beautifully reproduced. The first section of these gives a wide range of examples of Roman pavements. The only colour plates are those showing details of some of these mosaics, and these are particularly fine. Naturally, particular attention is paid to the Roman villa at Chedworth. Other sections cover Roman buildings and architectural fragments, hill-forts, 'Celtic' fields, Romano-British settlements, crop marks and features previously identified wrongly as 'hill-forts'. This last group, the discredited hill-forts, includes sites which may be Iron Age earth-works other than hill-forts, natural features mistaken for hill-forts, or sites for which there is no conclusive