American Journal of Archaeology

The volume New Cities in Late Antiquity: Documents and Archaeology is a welcome addition to the debate on urbanism in late antiquity. This collection of 19 essays written in French, English, and German, is the result of a conference on Late Antique cities held at the ANAMED center in Istanbul in 2013. As the editor Rizos points out, the late Roman empire was already heavily urbanized, but new cities were nonetheless founded to tighten control of the empire’s territory (9).

An outstanding book. It starts with a preface that is one of the finest and most evocative pieces about working in Turkey that I have ever read. Fieldwork is conducted by people in the present, even if we are usually thinking about people in the past. On and off, Mitford has been working in eastern Turkey for half a century, and he has now produced a piece of scholarship that will be the definitive starting point for studying the Roman frontier in eastern Turkey for the next generation of scholars.

This book explores in detail the Roman-period bridge over the Medjerda (ancient Bagrada) River at Chemtou (Simitthus), Tunisia, and the extraordinary milling installation that was constructed within its collapsed sections. It makes sense of the bridge’s extremely complex stages of construction and repair, from its foundation in the mid first century C.E. to its several phases of collapse, followed by the subsequent construction of the mill with horizontal water wheel in late antiquity or the Early Medieval period.

Current research on the history and archaeology of ancient North Africa is generating an impressive wealth of new data and publications every year. The present book collects 22 papers on North African sacred buildings and cults that were originally presented at an international conference in Paris in 2013. The aim is to provide an update of the debate in the previous symposium, Lieux de culte: Aires votives, temples, églises, mosqueés (Paris 2008).

The amount of scholarship dedicated to the study of ancient scientific texts has increased in the last few decades due in good part to the studies supported by Louis Callebat at the Université de Caen Normandie, including a conference organized in 2010 (P. Fleury, C. Jacquemard, and S. Madeleine, eds., La technologie gréco-romaine: Trasmission, restitution et mediation [Caen 2015]).

Ellis has produced a very thoughtful and rather compelling monograph on the subject of shops in Roman cities from the third century B.C.E into the second century C.E. He is careful to shift the discussion of retailing and urbanism beyond that of Pompeii, Ostia, and Rome, and the range of sites studied is impressive (table 1.1, 16–18): 44 from Italy, 10 from Spain, 12 from Gaul, 27 from Africa, 8 from the Balkans, and 22 from the Eastern Provinces.

Insularity and Identity in the Roman Mediterranean is a collection of essays concerned with identifying and exploring the ancient Mediterranean island communities that came in contact with the Roman empire. It resulted from a Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference session held at the University of Reading, UK in 2014.

The modern study of ancient coinage has a history extending back more than half a millennium. From the very beginning, what has captivated most scholars are the designs, or “types.” Indeed, even today the images are of prime concern, as we seek to unpack their meaning, identify the agents of their formulation and their significance, and discern their intelligibility among ancient viewers.

Libation was a ritual central to the lives of all Athenians. In her book, Gaifman uses the caryatids from the Erechtheion to frame her discussion and to emphasize the centrality of libation in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens. Most of our visual evidence for libations is on figure-decorated vases, but the caryatids, each of whom held a phiale at her side, were a constant presence on the Acropolis, seen by all who participated in rituals there, as were the women carrying phialae on the Parthenon frieze.

Ancient Thrace, long an understudied area whose territory spans the contemporary borders of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, has been increasingly a subject of study in recent years. The geographical focus of Memories in Stone is specifically Aegean Thrace, a modern label for the portion of ancient Thrace that lies above the northern coast of the Aegean and below Mount Rhodope between the Nestos and Hebros Rivers, all within the modern country of Greece.