Late Iron Age Calleva: The Pre-Conquest Occupation at Silchester Insula IX (Silchester Roman Town: The Insula IX Town Life Project 3). By M. Fulford, A. Clarke, E. Durham and N. Pankhurst. Britannia Monograph Series 32. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, London, 2018. Pp. 532, illus. Price: £75.00. isbn 9780907764458

While the first late Iron Age traces were discovered in the 1980s during excavations of the Roman Forum-Basilica (M. Fulford and J. Timby, Late Iron Age and Roman Silchester, London 2000), it has been the fieldwork in ‘Insula IX’ (uncovering slightly over 3,000 m2) that has provided the greatest amount of pre-conquest evidence. The book's 24 chapters are grouped into four thematic sections: introduction to the project and stratigraphic sequences; finds (subdivided into categories such as brooches, coins, glass vessels and pottery); environmental evidence (from animal remains to pollen analysis, radiocarbon dating and geochemistry); and the concluding discussion which summarises and contextualises the results. [...]the excellent environmental work, which reflects the highest standards of modern archaeological investigations, has provided some notable results: for example, that celery, coriander and olives were imported and consumed before the Claudian conquest (see also L. Lodwick, ‘Condiments before Claudius: new plant foods at the late Iron Age oppidum at Silchester, UK’, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 23 (2014), 543–9).