American Journal of Archaeology

The volume under review is beautifully illustrated with high-quality drawings, plans, and photographs and is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Minoan funerary practices. In keeping with the tradition of the site publications of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), the work undertaken in the Hagios Charalambos Cave is published in several volumes. This is the first of five volumes and deals with the excavation of the cave and the publication of the portable objects.

This handsome volume published by Oxbow Books is the proceedings of the Postgraduate Cypriot Archaeology (POCA) Conference at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, in October 2010, the 10th such meeting held.

Harmanşah develops a “critical archaeology of place” through an analysis of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age rock monuments in Turkey (2). Places, which are defined in this publication as deeply historical sites of cultural significance, memory, and belonging, have become obscured in a number of academic and global trends.

This monograph is the first scholarly work to explicitly consider the ascendance of the citadel amid the decline of villages in Early Bronze Age (EBA) Anatolia. It examines the divergent social worlds of these two settlement types in light of theoretical and methodological models, which diverge from the cultural-historical frameworks that have dominated Anatolian archaeology for decades.

The aim of this book, according to its author, is “to explore how governments in the Late Bronze Age, and especially the Assyrian state, made use of written instruments, and what effect this may have had on how they governed” (3). To accomplish this goal, Postgate analyzes the social and administrative contexts of the abundant primary sources, about half of which were published only in the last two decades. Postgate is one of the most influential specialists to work on ancient Assyria since its rediscovery in the mid 19th century.

The book is organized in seven chronologically ordered chapters sandwiched between introduction and conclusion; endnotes follow the text, before the bibliography and indices. Each chapter is built around a series of translations of text passages that offer opportunities to discuss various questions. This brief review can only touch on the central issues of what is presented and how it is dealt with, centering on “economic” issues.

Jenkins’ book is bound to raise hackles with many in the museum industry as well as others whose claims for the repatriation of objects in museum collections overseas she rejects. The book, the title of which aptly summarizes the content, is strident in tone and, in the context of the dominant discourse of the “New Museology” and of current museum practice, is perhaps deliberately provocative.