American Journal of Archaeology

Against the Grain is the latest book by Scott, whose earlier works have studied modern states and the means by which the poor and powerless have fought back within them. In this book, he aims to synthesize recent research on domestication, sedentism, and state formation, taking as examples Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. While denying any particular archaeological expertise, he nevertheless brings to the table considerable experience of thinking about the origin and operation of states and also of nonstate areas and peoples.

This edited volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, biological anthropologists, animal ethologists, and psychologists to explore the shared cognitive and evolutionary foundations of play, ritual, and sport. Inspired by Huizinga’s theory of Homo ludens, authors in part 1 of the compendium debate whether the “the primaeval soil of play” (32) underwrote the development of creativity, art, and religion in early human societies.

Rather than delivering a synthetic treatment of the hot-button theoretical issues enumerated in its title, and far from covering all of ancient China, this book concentrates on a single case study from the latter part of the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 B.C.E.). Its subject is the small, marginal, and relatively short-lived kingdom of Zhongshan in the foothills of the Taihang Mountains, about 300 km southwest of present-day Beijing. Zhongshan is first attested in the late sixth century B.C.E. and was extinguished ca. 296 B.C.E.; its rulers had taken the royal title by 323 B.C.E.

Lancaster’s book is the first to deal with a variety of building techniques other than concrete used for vaulting in Roman times (first to fourth century C.E.). Her work approaches in a taxonomic way the most innovative vaults used by Roman builders, showing their evolution and distribution in different regions. In relation to her previous book (L. Lancaster, Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome: Innovations in Context [Cambridge 2005]) the shift in focus is from Rome to the Roman provinces.

The most significant discovery of ancient graffiti in recent memory is surely that of the basilica of Smyrna. The substructures of the basilica were disinterred in 2003 and revealed a mass of handwritten messages visible on surviving wall plaster. Bagnall provided a first, satisfying glimpse of the basilica’s written treasures in his Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berkeley 2011); its first chapter presented an overview discussion of these handwritten texts.

The book under review comes out of the Oxford-based research project Last Statues of Antiquity (LSA), directed by the two editors between 2009 and 2012. It accompanies a freely accessible online database in which the project team meticulously compiled all evidence for the dedication or rededication between ca. 280 and 650 C.E. of about 2,800 statues. This large corpus of Late Antique statuary constitutes the book’s backbone.

The increasing prominence and popularity of artifact-based or “small finds” studies, particularly among graduate students, has surely been one of the major success stories of the archaeology of northwest Roman provinces in the last decade or so, a story in which Swift has played no small part. One unifying theme of this new generation of scholarship, ostensibly linked to the success of TRAC (Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference), has been the emphasis on using artifactual data to reveal new aspects of ancient Roman identities.

This book is an investigation of an understudied region of the Roman empire: Alentejo, Portugal. It is also a study of the dynamics of colonization in a contested landscape, and it is a rare example of what can be accomplished by an in-depth reading of the landscape. Within this larger discussion of the region, Williams creates context for his excavation of the first-century B.C.E. watchtower at Caladinho, Portugal (ch. 5).

This volume publishes a single house excavated at Amheida, ancient Trimithis, in Egypt’s Dakhleh Oasis, under the direction of the principal author. It aims to provide the first complete record of a domestic unit of Late Imperial date from Egypt and to undertake a regional and empire-wide comparative study. Thus the volume analyzes the stratigraphy, architecture, and finds grouped according to material or type (by various members of the Amheida team), discusses parallels, and assesses the social and cultural affiliations of the occupants.

The main aim of Koloski-Ostrow’s book is to identify whether the prevailing harsh sanitary conditions were improved or changed by latrines in cities and whether they were designed or sited according to public health considerations. The author seeks to remedy the previous aversion to the subject and to interpret the archaeological evidence in the context of the literary evidence and of studies of baths and infrastructure, without romanticizing the archaeological evidence. The book focuses on the first centuries B.C.E.