American Journal of Archaeology

A Roman sarcophagus took the measure of a Roman man—and a Roman woman. Unlike the tomb in which it was displayed, the coffin was made to human scale and often carved with vignettes from the deceased’s professional and personal life. These scenes were, for the most part, formulaic set pieces selected from a narrow range of stock episodes highlighting such common Roman milestones as battles won, marriages consummated, children raised, and death conquered through immortality.

In this book, Russell has brought together an impressive array of evidence, both old and new, in an effort to add the study of stone to the conversations about the Roman economy. It represents the fruits of his Oxford dissertation, which started as part of the Oxford Roman Economy Project (www.romaneconomy.ox.ac.uk). Russell is particularly concerned with process: how was the extraction, transportation, and dissemination organized, and who were the ones determining that organization?

Thomas and Meyers edit a set of papers that formed part of a colloquium organized for the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. This volume succeeds on two levels—it presents a slate of interesting and up-to-date papers, and it honors the oeuvre of Ingrid E.M. Edlund-Berry of the University of Texas at Austin, a scholar most known for her careful and meticulous work on the archaeology, society, and material culture of pre-Roman Italy. In fitting tribute to Edlund-Berry’s career, the volume focuses on the key themes of her work.

The study of textiles has received a tremendous boost in the fields of archaeology and ancient history in recent years. This is, in part, thanks to the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Textile Research in Copenhagen (2005–2016) and affiliated international collaborations and projects, such as Clothing and Identities: New Perspectives on Textiles in the Roman Empire, which has highlighted the prominent role played by textiles in ancient economies.

Recent volumes employing regional approaches to archaeological studies of southeastern Italy (including G. Volpe, La Daunia nell’età della romanizzazione: Paesaggio agrario, produzione, scambi [Bari 1990]; E. Isayev, Inside Ancient Lucania: Dialogues in History and Archaeology [London 2007]; M. Osanna, ed., Verso la città: Forme insediative in Lucania e nel mondo italico fra IV e III sec. a.C. Atti delle giornate di studio, Venosa, 13–14 maggio 2006 [Venosa 2009]; P. Attema, G.-J. Burgers, and P.M.

If warships served as the backbone of ancient sea power, and their construction reflected a vast economic commitment, how were these valuable vessels kept safe, ready for action, and on conspicuous display? With their exploration of the archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence for shipsheds, Blackman and his colleagues offer a comprehensive tour of this ancient Mediterranean phenomenon.

This book is a product of a conference that was intended to bring numismatists together with classicists, historians, art historians, and archaeologists to (according to the original call for papers) “explore new directions in the study of iconography on Graeco‐Roman coinage” (http://coinarchaeology.blogspot.com/2012/04/call-for-papers-art-in-round-new.html). Almost all the contributions discuss Roman coinage from the Late Republic to the Late Imperial period.

Variegated terrain around the Mediterranean, together with plentiful sources of stone, led to early construction of stone steps: among the earliest are those at the Tarxien complex on Malta, dated to the late fourth millennium B.C.E. Staircases, as Hollinshead points out in this interesting and thoughtful study, seem to be an intuitive invention that suits the biomechanics of the human body by allowing efficient ascents and descents.

This welcome book is the English version of a monograph published in Polish in 2011. The author has been a significant voice in sympotic studies for more than a decade, and this project presents the full scope of his views on the early history and development of the symposion.

In the field of ancient history, the Seleucid empire still ranks among the less-studied subjects, even though there is an increasing tendency in recent years to pay more attention to the Diadochi empires. The Seleucid empire (311–64 B.C.E.) was unlike anything the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had seen, with the exception of both the Achaemenid empire and that of Alexander the Great.