American Journal of Archaeology

Gela is a name that conjures many images. As a term, it means “cold river” (fiumefreddo in Italian), and it is likely a word of Sikel origin. As a name for a territory, it brings to mind the “fields of Gela,” famous in antiquity for waves of grain blown by the wind. As the modern name of a Sicilian city, it evokes the industrial folly of the 1950s that ignored the aesthetic and environmental values of the landscape in favor of petroleum refineries and a now-dated sense of modernity.

Hope Simpson’s study aims “to outline the state of our present knowledge concerning the Mycenaean settlements in Messenia, and to examine the evidence for reconstructing the political geography of the ‘Kingdom’ of Pylos” (1). The volume is concisely organized into three chapters that are laid out in neat subheadings.

The most recent volume of the Tiryns series is the first of two to discuss in detail the occupational history and stratigraphy of the 1976–1983 excavations by Klaus Kilian in the lower citadel of Tiryns and the northwestern part of its lower town. The study focuses on the Postpalatial period of the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E. and comprises a text (Tiryns 17[2]; reviewed by C.

The commonly held view that the topic of religion in the central and southern Greek mainland during the Middle Helladic (MH) and the Late Helladic (LH) I phases (ca. 2100/2000–1500 B.C.E.) constitutes an “archaeological nonstarter” (2) is explained by Whittaker as the outcome of an exclusionist view of religion “as a category of human experience separate unto itself” (36). Her highly welcome initiative here is to review evidence for belief and ritual in MH–LH I contexts classifiable as domestic or funerary.

For three-quarters of a century, the site of Ambelikou Aletri has held near-mythical status in Cypriot archaeology—it is widely regarded as the island’s earliest evidence for local copper production, even though there is virtually no documentation available to support this belief. Now, through the tenacious and authoritative efforts of Webb and Frankel, this pioneering excavation can finally assume its rightful place as one of the most important from Bronze Age Cyprus.

The Black Sea is a region often relegated to peripheral status in western calculations, but it has played and continues to play a central role in Eurasian history. Given the dizzying array of cultures, languages, and academic traditions encompassed by the region, any attempt to synthesize its history must be broad and ambitious in scope. Ivanova’s The Black Sea and the Early Civilizations of Europe, the Near East, and Asia, an overview of the seventh–third millennia B.C.E.

This expansive volume is the outcome of a conference organized in November 2009 at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, by Papadopoulos, a Hellenist, and Urton, an Andeanist. Twenty-five papers from the conference appear here, representing a wide array of geographic and temporal specialties, including the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, Mesoamerica, Neolithic Europe, and China. At the core of the book is a difficult-to-define concept: value.

In Making Ancient Cities, the editors, Creekmore and Fisher, bring together 10 case studies examining early urban development in traditional regions of early urbanism such as the Mediterranean, Near East, and Mesoamerica with lesser-known examples from Africa and North America. However, it is more than simply the collection of assorted examples that holds one’s interest in this volume.

The present volume is the culmination (and publication) of a rather ambitious project involving changing understandings of the human body from the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 40,000 BP) down to contemporary times. Undoubtedly, a diachronic study of the body was (over)due in the present era that deifies the (youthful) body-as-image, while not letting go of the older, ailing and dying body, often crossing the lines of ethics by extending the lives of bodies beyond their limits.

This book is a manifesto—prepare to be roused and challenged. Hamilakis claims that the discipline of archaeology must undergo radical changes and tackle head-on the difficult task of exploring the sensorial and affective dimensions of human experience. According to the author, a sensorial archaeology, one that aims to evoke, rather than to represent, sensorial, affective, and mnemonic experiences will be able to avoid a series of seemingly self-evident binary oppositions (e.g., subject vs. object or theory vs.