American Journal of Archaeology

This book on the cultic places of villages in southern Syria and northern Jordan, based partly on a doctoral thesis completed at Durham University (“Beyond Religion: Cultural Exchange and Economy in Northern Phoenicia and the Hauran, Syria,” 2014), aims to reconsider the impressive number of rural sanctuaries—57 of them—in the region of the Hauran from the first century BCE to the third century CE. The author’s term “cult centre” turns the reader’s attention to human activities in the ancient sanctuaries, perceived as vibrant places.

This volume is a long-awaited addition to the growing corpus of publications on this site. Although work at Cosa began in 1948, detailed analyses of materials uncovered during the early excavations have in many cases only recently appeared. Collins-Clinton’s thorough and meticulous volume, however, well rewards the wait. She is the undisputed expert on Cosa’s sculpture, which constituted the topic of her 1970 doctoral dissertation (Collins, “The Marble Sculptures from Cosa,” Columbia University) as well as a series of subsequent articles.

This publication is an eagerly awaited two-volume set that forms part of Blackwell’s ever-expanding “Companions to the Ancient World” series. Its focus is Greece and the Aegean, but a section is devoted to the wider Mediterranean. In chronological terms, it covers the long period from the Mycenaean era to the seventh century BCE—the Late Bronze Age (LBA) through to the later years of the Early Iron Age (EIA)—a period that saw the rise of complex society, its collapse, and its re-emergence some centuries later.

This book is the last of four fat volumes publishing revised versions of papers given at a series of conferences and workshops under the rubric “The Trans-Sahara Project: State Formation, Migration and Trade in the Central Sahara (1000 BC–AD 1500),” devoted to rethinking the Sahara Desert in antiquity. The project builds on and expands the research directed by Mattingly in the Wadi al-Ajal in central Libya, which focused on excavation and survey and the belated publication of work done in the 1960s and 1970s by C.M.

The Roman sanctuary at Bath (Aquae Sulis), with its temple precinct, three sets of baths, and the hot spring that fed them, was located within the city walls of an unusual town—a town in which no domestic, commercial, or industrial spaces have been found (52). Since the first Roman finds from the site emerged in the 18th century, the sanctuary has generated a great deal of scholarly interest in terms of its function and the divinities worshiped there (e.g., B. Cunliffe and P. Davenport, The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, vol.

Urban archaeology is a particularly fascinating field of research, but it is also challenging because of the patchy nature of the available datasets, like a puzzle of which one can only glimpse the pieces. It is especially rewarding, therefore, when researchers manage to draw a good picture of a site lying underneath urban stratigraphy that accumulated over the centuries. The town of Brescia (the Roman colonia civica Augusta Brixia) is a case in point.

When imagining a world of Roman gods, cult statues in marble, bronze, and chryselephantine spring easily to mind. Thus, it can be surprising to learn how little archaeological attention has been paid to Roman cult images, a state of affairs that Kiernan sets out to redress in this book by bringing archaeological evidence from the western provinces into dialogue with more well-known examples of cult images from Italy and elsewhere, including those mentioned in ancient texts.

In 1999, Avraham Biran directed his last season of excavation at the site of Tel Dan (Tell el-Qadi) in northern Israel. Biran had been excavating for 33 years at this site, and as he set out on this last campaign, he was already 90 years old. As that last season started, it was clear that there was no realistic way he would even begin to deal with the backlog of excavated material that he had produced, nor had he set aside the funding necessary for such a massive publication venture.

Thornton’s volume examines the relationship between British archaeologists who were active in the Near East from the late 19th to the early 20th century and publishing houses in Britain. Thornton investigates the ways in which archaeologists, whom she loosely defines as “anyone studying or operating within archaeological contexts or working with remains of the human past,” were “scripting spadework,” which is the process of “bringing the results of their research to the attention of the wider public” (1, 5).

The central argument of this book is that funerary monuments on the outskirts of Roman cities in peninsular Italy were not imbued with sinister connotations that required them to be isolated from the world of the living, as has often been assumed. Rather, they were closely integrated into their physical surroundings and contributed meaningfully to the lives and activities of the people who moved around them.