American Journal of Archaeology

“Scholars in the future may find it increasingly hard to grasp how ‘new’ this degree of attention, respect, and rigorous inquiry is for Roman Greece,” Alcock notes in the afterword of this volume (601), and she is certainly right. Since her Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge 1993), published 25 years ago, Greece under Roman rule has been the focus of much scholarly work.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that to excavate a site is also to destroy it, and perhaps nowhere has this been so true as in the case of ancient gardens, with their all too ephemeral botanical remains. The rescue of Roman garden sites was the driving force behind the work of Wilhelmina F.

The scholarly community working on Ostia is notably active and collegial. Since the 1990s, various foreign institutes in Rome, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza, have organized regular meetings to share new work on the ancient port town. The present volume publishes the proceedings of the 2014 colloquium held under the auspices of the Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome. Twenty-one of 33 papers are published, albeit in abbreviated form averaging 11 pages each. Most are written in French and Italian; three are in English.

Batty’s monograph on Ostia’s Domus del Ninfeo—an Imperial-period insula turned Late Antique domus—represents the culmination of her work for her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Manchester.

Levin-Richardson’s book fills a gap in the scholarship, since—as the author’s careful assessment of the literature abundantly makes clear—the Lupanar at Pompeii has never been subjected to a comprehensive study. To accomplish this objective, she combs all available primary sources, including excavation diaries and material finds; she considers the rather meager assortment of objects found in the structure; and she provides an impressive, in-depth analysis of the numerous graffiti.

This volume explores diachronic histories of Roman material culture, engaging the evolution of select works of art and architecture in the years, even centuries, after their creation. The book presents eight analyses of reuse and renovation, drawn from a range of media, from both the eastern and western Mediterranean, and from both public and private contexts. The essays are grouped into two chronologically ordered sections. Longfellow, Laird, Keesling, and Ossi examine material from the first and second centuries CE.

Roman altars, apart from special ones such as the Ara Pacis, are rarely the focus of a book-length study. They were the subject of Helen Cox Bowerman’s 1913 dissertation “Roman Sacrificial Altars: An Archaeological Study of Monuments in Rome” (Bryn Mawr; not cited by Moser), a descriptive catalogue and analysis of the altars known at that time and a snapshot of the state of the question in American scholarship in the early 20th century. So much has changed in the intervening 106 years.

Our image of Rome in the Middle Republic is filling out quickly. In recent years, a flood of important articles and books on architectural production, the political offices that supported and depended on it, public space, urban dynamics, architecture and social memory, and Roman expansion into Italy has augmented, and in some cases provided an entirely new footing for, study of the period.

“Of all the cities of Etruria, none takes so prominent a place in history as Veii” (xiii). So writes Tabolli at the beginning of this volume, borrowing the words of George Dennis in his landmark study of Etruscan topography The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (Cambridge 1848 [1]). The use of this quotation serves as a neat justification for the current publication ­by positioning Veii as one of the most (if not the most) historically preeminent cities of Etruria.

These two volumes present the results of five months of underwater fieldwork carried out over three seasons, 30 years ago (1984–1986). The volumes comprise the final publication of the Hellenistic harbor of Amathus, supplanting a dozen earlier articles, most of which are short annual reports published in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique and Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus. Exploration of the harbor occurred in conjunction with terrestrial excavations initiated by the French School at Athens in 1975.