American Journal of Archaeology

Fagan outlines the history of civilization through human settlement and subsistence patterns demonstrating the significance of fish and other marine products. Animal scavenging and plant foraging evolved into hunting and plant gathering, while fish catching, initially, was only a stopgap (x). An example of such hominin “opportunistic eating” (21) is evidenced at Olduvai Gorge sites of 1.75 million years ago, where catfish and animal bones are intermingled with stone artifacts.

The aim of this attractive new volume is to present results of ongoing studies of the archaeological evidence for violence and warfare in the past and to contribute to the development of method and theory for future work on the subject. The 19 papers are disparate, ranging from a study of wounds on bones of the Neolithic period to details of the distribution of Roman weapons on historically documented battle sites.

Thirty-five years ago, while I was completing an essay concerning Bronze Age Crete, a passage in V.G. Childe’s What Happened in History? (Harmondsworth 1942: 172) made an indelible impression on me: “The princes owed their power and wealth to a monopoly of new implements of war—long rapiers of costly bronze, huge shields and light horse-drawn chariots. . . .

Against the Grain is the latest book by Scott, whose earlier works have studied modern states and the means by which the poor and powerless have fought back within them. In this book, he aims to synthesize recent research on domestication, sedentism, and state formation, taking as examples Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. While denying any particular archaeological expertise, he nevertheless brings to the table considerable experience of thinking about the origin and operation of states and also of nonstate areas and peoples.

This edited volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, biological anthropologists, animal ethologists, and psychologists to explore the shared cognitive and evolutionary foundations of play, ritual, and sport. Inspired by Huizinga’s theory of Homo ludens, authors in part 1 of the compendium debate whether the “the primaeval soil of play” (32) underwrote the development of creativity, art, and religion in early human societies.

Rather than delivering a synthetic treatment of the hot-button theoretical issues enumerated in its title, and far from covering all of ancient China, this book concentrates on a single case study from the latter part of the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 B.C.E.). Its subject is the small, marginal, and relatively short-lived kingdom of Zhongshan in the foothills of the Taihang Mountains, about 300 km southwest of present-day Beijing. Zhongshan is first attested in the late sixth century B.C.E. and was extinguished ca. 296 B.C.E.; its rulers had taken the royal title by 323 B.C.E.

Lancaster’s book is the first to deal with a variety of building techniques other than concrete used for vaulting in Roman times (first to fourth century C.E.). Her work approaches in a taxonomic way the most innovative vaults used by Roman builders, showing their evolution and distribution in different regions. In relation to her previous book (L. Lancaster, Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome: Innovations in Context [Cambridge 2005]) the shift in focus is from Rome to the Roman provinces.

The most significant discovery of ancient graffiti in recent memory is surely that of the basilica of Smyrna. The substructures of the basilica were disinterred in 2003 and revealed a mass of handwritten messages visible on surviving wall plaster. Bagnall provided a first, satisfying glimpse of the basilica’s written treasures in his Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berkeley 2011); its first chapter presented an overview discussion of these handwritten texts.

The book under review comes out of the Oxford-based research project Last Statues of Antiquity (LSA), directed by the two editors between 2009 and 2012. It accompanies a freely accessible online database in which the project team meticulously compiled all evidence for the dedication or rededication between ca. 280 and 650 C.E. of about 2,800 statues. This large corpus of Late Antique statuary constitutes the book’s backbone.

The increasing prominence and popularity of artifact-based or “small finds” studies, particularly among graduate students, has surely been one of the major success stories of the archaeology of northwest Roman provinces in the last decade or so, a story in which Swift has played no small part. One unifying theme of this new generation of scholarship, ostensibly linked to the success of TRAC (Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference), has been the emphasis on using artifactual data to reveal new aspects of ancient Roman identities.