American Journal of Archaeology

I long ago lost count of the number of beautiful “coffee-table books” devoted to Pompeii. Each new entry in that market testifies to the apparently insatiable demand by the public at large to learn more about—or possess a souvenir of a visit to—what is undeniably one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites. Herculaneum attracts fewer tourists by far, and for understandable reasons.

During the years 1900–1902, excavations on privately owned property in the area of Campanian Boscoreale unearthed remains of a substantial Late Republican villa with wall decorations in what Mau was already calling the Late Second Style.

The Material Life of Roman Slaves complements and enriches a growing body of scholarship on the physical conditions and material remains of Roman slavery, but it also represents a logical continuation of the research agenda of both authors. It is clearly informed by Joshel’s book about occupational titles in funerary inscriptions (Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions [Norman, Okla.

Compared with other aspects of Greek and Roman art and archaeology, Roman architecture has not attracted the attention it deserves in recent anglophone literature. The standard syntheses by Boëthius and Ward-Perkins (Etruscan and Roman Architecture [Harmondsworth 1970]) and by MacDonald (The Architecture of the Roman Empire. Vol. 1, An Introductory Study [New Haven and London 1965]; The Architecture of the Roman Empire. Vol.

This volume contains many well-written, thought-provoking, and up-to-date contributions and is thus an important reference work. A substantial number of current research interests in the archaeology of the Roman republic are represented in 37 chapters, grouped into six sections. Given the rather unspecific title of the first section (“Material Culture and Its Impact on Social Configuration”), unsurprisingly, it contains 10 chapters on a wide variety of themes, from architecture to demography.

Corpus vasorum antiquorum is the oldest project of the Union Académique Internationale (UAI). It was conceived by Edmond Pottier at the Louvre and intended to publish all ancient pottery in public and private collections worldwide. The first fascicle was published in 1922. As in all the early volumes, vases were supplied with the briefest of descriptions, state of preservation, measurements, date, bibliography, and small black-and-white photographs.

In the volume under review, Lombardo says “we must avoid thinking of the process of cultural exchange between Greeks and indigenous populations, and even of the cultural borrowing by the natives, as a unilateral process of transmission, reception, and diffusion of Greek cultural elements prompted by a presumed superior level or prestige of Greek culture” (31). This quote, in many ways, epitomizes an underlying direction for this volume, which consists of 13 separate chapters separated into five umbrella headings.

Some of the most important debates on Mediterranean trade and colonization in the Early Iron Age are centered on Euboean ceramics and their wide exportation from the Syro-Palestinian littoral to the Atlantic coast of Iberia. This volume makes an important contribution to the subject by offering the results of a major project of chemical analysis of Euboean and related pottery.

Between 1983 and 1992, cleaning and excavations were conducted by Geraldine Gesell, Day, and William Coulson at Vronda, Kavousi, Crete, a site first investigated by Harriet Boyd in 1901. After a first volume of final publication by Day, Klein, and Turner (Kavousi IIA: The Late Minoan IIIC Settlement at Vronda.

This third volume in the series A Companion to Linear B was published in May 2014; Morpurgo Davies died four months later, on 27 September (vii). Her passing is a great loss. The volume consists of two chapters: “Mycenaean Writing,” a detailed holistic treatment of Linear B by Melena, and “Linear B and Homer,” a history of the “Homeric Question” by Bennet.