American Journal of Archaeology

The exquisite Roman frescoes conserved in situ at Egypt’s Luxor temple, the subject of this volume, are in many ways a departure from the non-naturalistic style most often associated with art of the Tetrarchic emperors. The volume is unprecedented in its multidisciplinary perspective and admirable dual goals of considering these frescoes for the first time in their original architectural, archaeological, and historical environments and placing them more firmly within the greater context of Tetrarchic ideology and Roman artistic achievement writ large.

This book focuses on a defined body of material culture from the first and second centuries C.E.: the inscribed monuments of the Augustales in Italy. These were the monuments of men (and a few women) who were financially as well-to-do as the traditional elite of their communities but lacked the legal right to participate in municipal government (most were freedmen). These monuments were part of the urban fabric of every Italian town, presenting the modern scholar with an opportunity to see the contributions and responses of one element of a complex society to other elements and to itself.

Depictions of architecture are some of the most abundant and underanalyzed elements of Roman art.

Beginning in the Roman Imperial period, individuals from a broad social spectrum could afford a decent burial in a built-up tomb and an inscription that perpetuated their memory. In the city of Rome, the bulk of funerary inscriptions commemorated the lives of men, women, and children of modest means and humble social status. From a strictly historical perspective, some of the most interesting tombs in Rome are large, collective burials. These brought together mostly unrelated individuals, who, while they could not afford a mausoleum of their own, could pay for a spot in one.

The longevity of Roman construction on land is well known, and some notable concrete structures that still stand today are justifiably celebrated. The survival of Roman concrete harbor works is perhaps even more astonishing, having resisted for so long the force of the sea—modern concrete structures are commonly demolished after but a small fraction of the time. So what is it about Roman concrete that explains its extraordinary resilience?

This lavishly illustrated edited volume is the second of three that have resulted from the Memoria Romana project that Galinsky has directed since 2009. While the other two (Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory [Ann Arbor 2014] and Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity [Oxford 2016]) focus more on the capital city and written evidence, the balance here falls explicitly more toward material culture, especially in the provinces.

This book represents a synthesis of papers from two international conferences: the First International CAPP Symposium, New Approaches to Archaeological Human Remains in Cyprus, and a conference with the same title as the volume.

Comparison is a complicated task. Done well, it dusts off our perceptions, opens new pathways for investigation, and makes one field or topic accessible to scholars of another. It offers a healthy response to the hypercritical, positivistic approaches that can come from too narrowly relying on one case study or specialization; it is often the unexamined cousin of the interdisciplinarity that has become the de rigueur claim for relevance in the academic world. The risks of comparison are as substantial, however, as the rewards.

This book provides a long-overdue synthesis of Sardinia’s Nuragic era, named after the roughly 7,000 monumental stone towers, or nuraghi, located throughout the island. It is an introductory treatise that builds on the author’s prior monograph on the subject (A Prehistory of Sardinia 2300–500 B.C. Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 5 [Sheffield, England 1996]).

This volume is both a study of Hellenistic bronze sculpture and a catalogue of an exhibition that traveled from Florence to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., between the summers of 2015 and 2016. As the editors of the book (also curators of the exhibition) state, the purpose of the exhibition was to bring together (for the first time) enough bronze sculpture of the highest quality and comparable monumentality from a wide enough geographical and temporal range to begin to deconstruct the aura of specialness and “splendid isolation” that follows bronze.