This useful volume sets the brooches from Vienna (Roman Vindobona) in their archaeological and historical contexts — one of a series of monographs that matches the quality of those from Augst and Vindonissa. It starts by outlining the history of archaeological research into the Roman occupation of the area, going back to a sixteenth-century interest in epigraphy and describing the sites and individuals involved in the familiar urban pattern of discoveries made during the building boom of the nineteenth century and the more formal excavations of the twentieth century. This leads on to sections on the origins and history of Vindobona, concentrating on the fortress and its troops, the other zones of occupation, principally the canabae and the civil settlement, the site's strategic importance on the limes, and its relationship to other sites in the area

Descriptions and discussions of the various brooch types from the area follow, with the catalogue and figures relegated to the end of the book. Some of the brooches are from museum collections and are not necessarily well provenanced, others are from excavations and have a good archaeological context. The types are not presented in strict chronological order, but are arranged so that groups of brooches and broad chronological trends can be highlighted. Distribution maps are included for a limited number of types and a small number of photographs enliven this section (some in colour). A silver Flügelfibel with elaborately pierced and decorated catchplate stands out as a stunning piece of craftsmanship, and a partially gilded silver plate brooch found in the late nineteenth century in a child's sarcophagus is almost certainly unique — it depicts the personification of the Danube reclining between river and forest. Such finds enable not only date and distribution to be taken into account for brooch types, but also gender and social status, forging links between objects and the people who wore them. The catalogue gives brief descriptions to supplement the illustrations, as well as all the archival data necessary for future curators and researchers. The drawings show brooches as worn, i.e. with the ‘foot’ at the top, although this could perhaps have been relaxed for the zoomorphic pieces.

Having laid out the two themes of the book — the history of Vindobona and the brooches found in the area — Schmid goes on to link the two more intimately, first by slotting the archaeological material into defined historical periods, then by examining the evidence for brooch production, and finally by looking at the distribution of the finds in terms of brooch type and site type. The latter include the legionary fortress, the canabae, the cemeteries, the civil settlement and the outlying settlements. The data are not, of course, clear-cut, but there are some interesting trends. Knee brooches are equally well-represented within the fortress and canabae in terms of numbers, but in the former they represent nearly a quarter of the assemblage compared to about 14 per cent in the latter. Developed crossbow brooches also occur in both zones, but form 14 per cent of the fortress assemblage and only 4 per cent in the canabae. In each case the numbers in the civil settlement are slightly below those in the canabae. Developed crossbows form over a third of the brooches recovered from graves — over half if the earlier forms of crossbow are included — stressing the perceived importance of carrying status on into the afterlife for the military population.

Plotting the later first-century brooches found in the city points up the site of an auxiliary fort on the line of the limes, and a plot of late Roman brooches by type within the fortress shows concentrations in the barrack blocks and tribunes' houses rather than in the baths and principia. A greater dataset is needed to be sure that what appears to be a use of crossbow brooches by tribunes is genuine, given that they also appear in the barrack blocks. The final part of this section broadens out to compare the brooch assemblages from several sites of varying types in Pannonia Superior, Noricum and Moesia Superior. In some cases the differences between them relate to date, in others to regional use, in others to site type.

Overall, S.'s attempts to make his data yield up nuggets of information relating to the socio-economic, military and political aspects of life in Vindobona, its hinterland and other sites in the wider region, reveal a thoughtful and thought-provoking approach. He demonstrates that a well-researched corpus of material need not be huge — there are only 369 brooches — for it to flesh out the interplay between the history and the archaeology of a site.