American Journal of Archaeology

This book is an investigation of an understudied region of the Roman empire: Alentejo, Portugal. It is also a study of the dynamics of colonization in a contested landscape, and it is a rare example of what can be accomplished by an in-depth reading of the landscape. Within this larger discussion of the region, Williams creates context for his excavation of the first-century B.C.E. watchtower at Caladinho, Portugal (ch. 5).

This volume publishes a single house excavated at Amheida, ancient Trimithis, in Egypt’s Dakhleh Oasis, under the direction of the principal author. It aims to provide the first complete record of a domestic unit of Late Imperial date from Egypt and to undertake a regional and empire-wide comparative study. Thus the volume analyzes the stratigraphy, architecture, and finds grouped according to material or type (by various members of the Amheida team), discusses parallels, and assesses the social and cultural affiliations of the occupants.

The main aim of Koloski-Ostrow’s book is to identify whether the prevailing harsh sanitary conditions were improved or changed by latrines in cities and whether they were designed or sited according to public health considerations. The author seeks to remedy the previous aversion to the subject and to interpret the archaeological evidence in the context of the literary evidence and of studies of baths and infrastructure, without romanticizing the archaeological evidence. The book focuses on the first centuries B.C.E.

This volume, the 12th in the series Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy, derives from a conference held in Oxford in 2012 and seeks to connect ongoing work in Pompeii to ongoing debates in Roman economic history with a view to reigniting the debate over whether individual cities can contribute to our understanding of the Roman economy (rejected by Jongman in the book’s closing discussion).

This study of the archaeological and documentary evidence for medieval land use and settlement patterns in the Nemea Valley is the second volume of the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (NVAP). As the foreword by its directors explains, this project carried out intensive survey, combined with geomorphology, historical ecology, and anthropological studies, in 1984 to 1986 and 1989 (viii).

Islands lend themselves well to comprehensive studies because of their circumscribed nature, and Sicily, “a continent in miniature” (65), is no exception. De Angelis’ book embraces this theme and presents a systematic and far-reaching investigation that both offers a novel approach to the historiography of Sicily and provides new insights through theoretical and quantitative analyses.

Only specialists in the history and archaeology of ancient Sicily have likely heard of Kale Akte (Roman Calacte), an ancient town on the northern coast of Sicily about midway between Palermo and Messina. Kale Akte is described on this volume’s back cover as a “typical ‘minor’ Greek-Roman city of Sicily.” While Kale Akte was clearly not a major player in the ancient history of Sicily, whether it can be called “typical” is less certain.

In this volume, London summarizes the kitchen equipment people used in the Levant and Cyprus from prehistory through the early modern period and aims to contextualize this archaeological evidence through ethnographic study of traditional potters in present-day Cyprus. Scholars of ancient cuisine will recognize the significance of this project because, as London reminds us, specific detailed references in the ancient and medieval written record to the preparation of food are sparse.

This collection of 57 papers, the second volume from an impressive 2012 conference at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, augments a substantial companion work that focuses on theory and practice (S. Müth, P.I. Schneider, M. Schnelle, and P.D. De Staebler, eds., Ancient Fortifications: A Compendium of Theory and Practice. Fokus Fortifikation Studies 1 [Oxford 2015]). These two volumes boldly place in high profile the archaeological research now concerned with this once ancillary area.

Between 1981 and 1992, an American team conducted fieldwork at Kavousi, in East Crete, focusing on a cluster of sites in their microregional, historical, and ecological contexts. One of the sites the team excavated was Vronda, a Late Minoan (LM) IIIC (ca. 1170–1050 B.C.E.) hilltop village that grew larger than 0.5 ha and included 20–25 houses and a population of 100–150 people. The small size, defensible location, and brief occupation of Vronda are typical of the settlement pattern that emerged in Crete in the transition to the Early Iron Age.