American Journal of Archaeology

The collecting of early Christianity’s remnants has an extraordinary history. In the fourth century, the Empress Helena made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and allegedly returned with the True Cross, Holy Tunic, and Nails of the Crucifixion.

For many years, the fabulous site of Petra in Jordan remained an enigma. The extraordinary rock-cut monuments of this ancient city, often described as “half as old as time,” were well documented and dated broadly to the Roman period, but both the origins and ultimate fate of the city and its inhabitants, the Nabataean Arabs, remained shrouded in mystery. The present volume makes a significant contribution to both periods, especially the latter.

When considering the subject of urban workshops and Roman North Africa, one thinks most readily of the attempts to bring archaeological evidence to bear on the debate over the position of the city within the broader economic systems of the ancient Mediterranean. In 2001, for example, amphora production at Leptiminus on the coastline of Tunisia and textile production at Thamugadi in inland Algeria provided case studies for Mattingly and Salmon’s edited volume Economies Beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (London).

Strabo famously praised the southern Spanish region of Turdetania as the most civilized of Iberia, a place where abundant resources, trade networks, and a well-developed urban tradition allowed quick integration into Rome’s growing empire (3.2.1–15). This perception has long permeated scholarship, but it is one that has been gradually reassessed in a growing corpus of Spanish work. This new edited volume presents these fresh perspectives on the romanization of Turdetania.

For the seven centuries during which Sicily fell under Roman purview (ca. 250 BCE–450 CE), the island evolved from its Greek and Phoenician roots to an important center for the expanding (then declining) Roman hegemony around the Mediterranean Sea. This book explores, archaeologically, the effects Roman rule had on Sicilian urbanism, as social, political, and economic influences forced the island’s inhabitants to constantly adapt their urban environments.

“Scholars in the future may find it increasingly hard to grasp how ‘new’ this degree of attention, respect, and rigorous inquiry is for Roman Greece,” Alcock notes in the afterword of this volume (601), and she is certainly right. Since her Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge 1993), published 25 years ago, Greece under Roman rule has been the focus of much scholarly work.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that to excavate a site is also to destroy it, and perhaps nowhere has this been so true as in the case of ancient gardens, with their all too ephemeral botanical remains. The rescue of Roman garden sites was the driving force behind the work of Wilhelmina F.

The scholarly community working on Ostia is notably active and collegial. Since the 1990s, various foreign institutes in Rome, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza, have organized regular meetings to share new work on the ancient port town. The present volume publishes the proceedings of the 2014 colloquium held under the auspices of the Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome. Twenty-one of 33 papers are published, albeit in abbreviated form averaging 11 pages each. Most are written in French and Italian; three are in English.