American Journal of Archaeology

The reconstruction of the processes used to create metal vessels in Minoan Crete has been a challenging subject because of the nature of the evidence. The Minoans imported the raw materials of silver, lead, copper, and tin, and they exported finished products. As a result of the fact that numerous objects were made for export, many vessels that might suggest the use of complex metallurgical techniques in the Cretan Bronze Age workshops have not been found on Crete itself.

Like the ongoing repairs to a seagoing ship, our knowledge of the Phoenicians is a work in progress. Initially due to the Iron Age texts, the Phoenicians garnered a reputation for seafaring prowess. With excavations of suspected Phoenician colonies or trading posts extending to and beyond Gibraltar, archaeology has attested to a Levantine waterborne expansion westward.

Gezer VI presents the small finds from the first two phases of the excavations of Gezer in Israel between 1964 and 1974 by Hebrew Union College (HUC). While some of the site’s small finds appeared in Gezer I to V, and VII, this volume does not republish any of those figures. It does include the finds, however, in the data set presented here, except for the small finds from the burial cave in Field I that were published as Gezer V.

Hasanlu, a high mound surrounded by a large lower mound in the Ušnu-Solduz Valley south of Lake Urmia in extreme northwestern Iran, was excavated by Robert H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania from 1956 to 1977. The site is perhaps best known to the public from the many popular articles by Dyson and others that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s on its Iron Age II burned palace (Hasanlu Period IVb, ca. 1050–800 B.C.E.) with its more than 250 skeletons and its famous golden bowl.

This fascinating book offers a number of chapters outlining some of the newest ideas and theories in the study of ancient warfare. Based on papers presented at the 2013 International Ancient Warfare Conference, the 18 chapters in this volume span “archaeology and social history to more traditional tactics and strategy” (ix) in order to expand our understanding of this area of history.

This volume brings together and expands on a series of papers presented at a workshop organized by the editor at the 8th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East held in Warsaw in 2012. It addresses important questions faced by archaeologists trying to identify and define religious structures or thought in periods that lack significant textual information.

Negotiating Culture: Heritage, Ownership, and Intellectual Property, explores the notion of owning things—things like archival documents and personal papers, artifacts, DNA, human remains, language, oral histories, and the Internet. Over the course of a year (2006–2007), the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts (ISHA) held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst focused on questions surrounding how things are owned, why they are owned, who owns them, and whether or not things can be owned.

Dyson presents a well-researched biography of William J. Stillman, 19th-century artist, photographer, art critic, journalist, and amateur classical archaeologist. He applies an anthropological-archaeology perspective to portray the cultural and political history of Stillman’s world. Chapter titles emphasize landmarks in Stillman’s life (e.g., ch. 1, “A Schenectady Youth”; ch. 2, “The Making of an Artist and Critic”), and each chapter is enriched with lengthy descriptions of places, people, and relevant events.