Over the second half of the twentieth century a number of well-illustrated catalogues raisonnées appeared describing the Roman period figured bronzes found in many of the countries of Western Europe. It is unfortunate that no equivalent corpus of figured bronzes emerged from Britain, although in the 1970s and 80s there were some studies focused on particular figurine types or civitates, while Green set votive items of all forms and materials in their wider ritual context. Durham's presentation here of over 1,000 figurines from Roman Britain goes some way to fill the lacuna, but the almost total absence of objects with figurative elements means that little sense is conveyed to the reader of the wealth and contextual range of visual imagery during this period. Similarly, restricting the study to metal figurines inevitably impacts upon distribution, and the omission of figurines in other materials such as pipeclay, jet and wood points up the value of a more wide-ranging approach.

Apart from the introduction and catalogue, the article has four major sections, on production and materials, types present, spatial and social distribution, and chronology. The first is a valuable overview that includes details of surface treatments, and the last yields no real new insights. Few types are given more than minimal discussion, so that there is little sense here of the richness and subtlety of the interpretatio romana or an equivalent interpretatio indigena. The section on spatial and social distribution represents the focal point of D.'s work. Spatially the emphasis is as expected, with gaps in the more hilly and less populated/Romanised areas south of Hadrian's Wall, and only a trail north from there up to the Antonine Wall. The PAS data also behave predictably, with few or no finds from urban and protected zones, but an emphasis on certain rural areas. In terms of social distribution D. breaks new ground. The majority of those figurines that can be attributed with certainty to a site type come from urban and military sites, while rural finds (mostly from sanctuaries or votive contexts) are just above half those from towns and only slightly below those from military establishments. The overall picture strongly suggests that the inhabitants of small towns did not make use of figurines with the same enthusiasm as those of large ones. Even within the large towns there are striking differences, as 40 per cent of the figurines in that group come from London but there is only one example from Lincoln and none from Gloucester. Identity and the religious and cultural affiliations of the inhabitants of the various places clearly played a part here. Similarly, the high number of forts and fortresses with metal figurines highlights the importance of identity and adds gender to the mix, and the article could have benefited from more exploration of the causes underpinning these differences between the various places and site types.

The distributions of the more commonly found figurines form the final part of this section. Among the deities examined in detail, Mercury and his animal companions are shown to be widespread apart from an almost total absence from the Midlands. Hercules appears more often in the east than elsewhere, and most often in large towns, especially London. Jupiter and his eagle are widespread, Mars is chiefly found in the south. Although the latter distribution is tempered in the text by comparison to the evidence from inscriptions, it would have been good to see a map or table stressing the number of inscriptions involved. Turning to the data, which are admirably searchable on a number of fields, perhaps the author and publishers could remedy the absence of ‘Place’ from the search results. This field is buried within the full catalogue entry located one level deeper in the first column of the search results but could profitably be switched with the field for ‘Site name’, which is a subset of ‘Place’.

In all, drawing together the metal figurines from antiquarian, excavation, museum and metal-detecting sources is a major achievement and D. should be congratulated on producing some useful results.