American Journal of Archaeology

This volume represents the final publication of the late Elizabeth Lyding Will’s work with the amphoras recovered in the American Academy in Rome’s (AAR) excavations at the Roman town of Cosa carried out during the years 1948–1954 and 1965–1972. Will passed away in 2009 before completing her work with these materials, and the project was taken on and seen through to completion by the volume’s second author, Kathleen Warner Slane.

The Temple of Peace is a unique monument since it was, as Tucci points out in the opening of this massive two-volume study, the only temple dedicated to Pax in the whole of the Roman empire. These two volumes contain masses of information that are based on an exceptionally detailed study of all the archaeological and standing remains, textual sources, and inscriptions.

The investigation of the burials of infants and children has always been a challenging aspect of funerary archaeology. Infants and children are typically underrepresented in archaeological samples because they are often the recipients of differential burial treatment (e.g., placement in child-specific burial areas, shallow graves, domestic areas), which can complicate their discovery. Furthermore, the recovery of their skeletal remains is difficult because their bones are small, fragile, and prone not only to rapid decay, but also to misidentification by excavators.

Von Mehren’s impressive volume provides one means of gauging the progress that has been made in studies of ancient cemeteries in the region surrounding the Gulf of Naples. The author has undertaken the daunting task of publishing funerary data that had been recovered decades earlier, during a period when physical anthropology in Italy remained a research area largely separated from mainstream classical archaeology.

This book treats the long-term history and social structure of ancient Greece from the Neolithic period to the second century CE using complexity theory as an explanatory framework. It is published as part of a Cambridge University Press series (Case Studies in Early Societies), the stated aim of which is to introduce early societies with a long history of archaeological research to students and scholars in adjacent fields, certainly an admirable objective.

Mycenaean religion has occupied a sizable part of the bibliography pertaining to the Bronze Age Aegean, as relevant scholarship has grown exponentially during the last 150 years. A boost to the field was afforded by the decipherment of Linear B in the mid 20th century and by its revelations regarding actual people’s roles in cult activities.

This slim volume is a collection of eight papers originally given as a colloquium at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco. The geographical focus of these papers was on the large plain of Ierapetra and offshore island of Chryssi on the south coast of East Crete; the chronological emphasis is the Bronze Age. In the Classical to Roman periods, this was the territory of the powerful polis of Ierapytna. Today, the plain is carpeted with hundreds of plastic agricultural hothouses that have made Ierapetra the third wealthiest city in all of Greece.

Coming Together joins recent volumes exploring complexity and urbanism through archaeological evidence and historical documentation. Like those works, it seeks to reveal commonalities and diversities inherent in the processes of population aggregation and persistence. However, its specific concentration on population nucleation per se, gained by expanding coverage to earlier preurban village forms, makes this collection unique.

While cultural-historical narratives continue to dominate much of the literature on the archaeology of the southern Levant, an increasing number of interdisciplinary studies and theoretically informed approaches have gradually introduced southern Levantine archaeology—a deeply politicized topic—into global archaeological discussions.