American Journal of Archaeology

Current research on the history and archaeology of ancient North Africa is generating an impressive wealth of new data and publications every year. The present book collects 22 papers on North African sacred buildings and cults that were originally presented at an international conference in Paris in 2013. The aim is to provide an update of the debate in the previous symposium, Lieux de culte: Aires votives, temples, églises, mosqueés (Paris 2008).

The amount of scholarship dedicated to the study of ancient scientific texts has increased in the last few decades due in good part to the studies supported by Louis Callebat at the Université de Caen Normandie, including a conference organized in 2010 (P. Fleury, C. Jacquemard, and S. Madeleine, eds., La technologie gréco-romaine: Trasmission, restitution et mediation [Caen 2015]).

Ellis has produced a very thoughtful and rather compelling monograph on the subject of shops in Roman cities from the third century B.C.E into the second century C.E. He is careful to shift the discussion of retailing and urbanism beyond that of Pompeii, Ostia, and Rome, and the range of sites studied is impressive (table 1.1, 16–18): 44 from Italy, 10 from Spain, 12 from Gaul, 27 from Africa, 8 from the Balkans, and 22 from the Eastern Provinces.

Insularity and Identity in the Roman Mediterranean is a collection of essays concerned with identifying and exploring the ancient Mediterranean island communities that came in contact with the Roman empire. It resulted from a Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference session held at the University of Reading, UK in 2014.

The modern study of ancient coinage has a history extending back more than half a millennium. From the very beginning, what has captivated most scholars are the designs, or “types.” Indeed, even today the images are of prime concern, as we seek to unpack their meaning, identify the agents of their formulation and their significance, and discern their intelligibility among ancient viewers.

Libation was a ritual central to the lives of all Athenians. In her book, Gaifman uses the caryatids from the Erechtheion to frame her discussion and to emphasize the centrality of libation in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens. Most of our visual evidence for libations is on figure-decorated vases, but the caryatids, each of whom held a phiale at her side, were a constant presence on the Acropolis, seen by all who participated in rituals there, as were the women carrying phialae on the Parthenon frieze.

Ancient Thrace, long an understudied area whose territory spans the contemporary borders of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, has been increasingly a subject of study in recent years. The geographical focus of Memories in Stone is specifically Aegean Thrace, a modern label for the portion of ancient Thrace that lies above the northern coast of the Aegean and below Mount Rhodope between the Nestos and Hebros Rivers, all within the modern country of Greece.

It is surprising how much attention is paid in the modern study of ancient Greek art to change, for art is predicated on materially embodied objects, whereas change is an inherently immaterial logical structure. As Osborne puts it in his ambitious new book, “describing how the painting and sculpture of one period differs from that of preceding [periods] should not be mistaken for offering an account of the change that has occurred” (5).

This sizable volume, which presents the proceedings of a 2010 conference of the same name, has already taken its place as a benchmark volume for Aegean prehistorians. Like Problems in Greek Prehistory (E.B. French and K.A. Wardle, eds. [Bristol, U.K., 1988]), invoked by the editors in their introduction, Mycenaeans Up To Date seeks to address enduring scholarly questions but within the narrower chronological and geographical scope of Mycenaean archaeology of the northeastern Peloponnese.

The volume presents a collection of contributions dedicated to the archaeology of northern Anatolia in the Roman and Byzantine periods. By involving scholars from both museum and academic institutions, it explores the state of research in the region, offering an important glimpse of the results of several international projects in Paphlagonia and Pontus. The book stems from a conference held in Amasya in 2014 that was part of the research project Where East Meets West (University of Southern Denmark) sponsored by the Danish Council for Independent Research.