American Journal of Archaeology

The impressive artifacts recovered from the eighth-century B.C.E. Tomb of the Warrior at Tarquinia (Lazio, Italy) have long been touchstones for comparative descriptions of material culture from throughout Etruria as well as other areas in the Etruscan trading sphere. The authors of this massive volume have brought together 30 other specialists to provide an unparalleled examination of the spectacular tomb, including the history of its discovery, detailed study of the artifacts, and evaluations of their relationships with material culture of that period.

The physical evidence available for understanding the earliest phases of the city of Rome has grown rapidly in recent years. At the same time, a number of regional archaeological projects in Latium have added to our understanding of how the areas around Rome developed. Fulminante’s new book aims to bring together this wide array of data within a theoretical model that can explain the beginnings of urban society in Rome and Latium.

The study of Italian urbanism has witnessed a dynamic period of renewed interest in recent years, fueled by a wealth of new information from excavation, geophysical research, scientific analysis, and regional survey that has called many long-standing theories into question. At the same time, new methodologies, a changing regional focus, and a general reassessment of the central questions of ancient urbanism itself have led to richly varied scholarship. This edited volume explores and illustrates the current state of research on Italian urbanism in the first millennium B.C.E.

This publication, the third in the series on the chora of Metaponto, is a comprehensive compilation of survey work and analysis that spans decades of field research in the territory of the Greek polis. The work aims to trace the use of the territory across nearly a millennium of occupation, from the foundation of the Greek city to Roman occupation.

It is a distinct challenge to produce a guide to a museum collection, or as in this case a portion of such a collection, that both gives that corpus of objects the attention it deserves and provides the reader with a thorough, current, and accurate account of the category of artifact under consideration. In this modestly sized but beautifully illustrated volume, Mattusch, the most innovative and important scholar of ancient bronzes today, manages to provide even the most uninitiated reader with a comprehensive understanding of a subject fraught with complexity and controversy.

This comprehensive account of the little-known, partially excavated temple and sanctuary of Artemis Tauropolos at modern Loutsa (ancient Halai Araphenides) on the east coast of Attica incorporates intriguing literary testimonia with fragmentary physical remains, including monumental architecture, inscriptions, ceramics, and small finds.

Cline’s book is something special in ancient history writing—a popular best seller with academic credentials. This may be surprising, given that its subject is the history of the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and, in particular, the collapse of kingdoms and empires therein around the end of the 13th and the early 12th centuries B.C.E.—not, one might think, evidently mistakenly, a popular subject.

This book is the result of an analytical research program on Mycenaean-type pottery in Italy, which has spanned several decades, since the first presentation by Jones at the conference Traffici micenei nel Mediterraneo in 1984 (Traffici micenei nel Mediterraneo: Problemi storici e documentazione archeologica. Atti del Convegno di Palermo, 11–12 maggio e 3–6 dicembre 1984 [Taranto 1986] 205–14). Several of the results of the research program have already appeared in a range of publications.

Cynthia Shelmerdine is one of the foremost Aegeanists of our time. The wide-reaching influence of her research is clearly evident in the Festschrift under review, which contains 24 papers by former students and colleagues. The papers are ordered into five sections—KE-RA-ME-JA: Ceramic Studies; TA-RA-SI-JA: Industry and Craft Specialization; I-JE-RE-JA: Religion and Iconography; TI-MI-TI-JA: Pylos and Messenia; WA-NA-KA-TE-RA: Writing and Administration—the titles and themes of which are intended to reflect the research interests of the honorand.

This volume is the second of a pair dedicated to a comprehensive presentation of Aegean art, from the Neolithic through the end of the Bronze Age. In an age when handbooks and companions comprised of chapters written by area specialists proliferate, it is a little surprising to see so ambitious a project undertaken by a sole author. Poursat demonstrates one of the great advantages of the latter approach, maintaining a taut organization and consistent tone throughout, providing a coherence often lacking in edited collections.