American Journal of Archaeology

Fluvial Landscapes in the Roman World is a timely contribution to growing discourses on the relationship between humans and the environment. The product of a 2014 conference organized with the Oxford Roman Economy Project, this volume employs varied methodologies and data sets with the aim of illuminating rivers and the lives of people who depended on or were impacted by them. Classicists, historians, archaeologists, and environmental scientists will all find portions of this book accessible and enlightening.

As Ward-Perkins pointed out in his Roman Imperial Architecture (New Haven 1981), Roman North Africa is “almost embarrassingly rich in monuments” (371). The site of Dougga, ancient Thugga, in Africa Proconsularis, stands out for the magnificence of preserved ancient buildings. Yet despite such richness, only in recent years has this impressive heritage become the subject of comprehensive studies.

Following a concise summary of scholarship on Roman Crete, Francis posits two key aims of this publication in the introduction: to highlight the importance of Crete and to show how it could contribute to debates about Rome and the provinces. In many respects these kinds of issues have been addressed in individual publications over the last decade, and more focused questions are now required to move the discussion forward.

The reader expecting a critical review of the archaeological evidence brought to light solely in Antioch might be misled by the title of this book. In fact, De Giorgi’s work also focuses its attention on the Antiochene hinterland in an attempt to link Antioch to its surroundings through a comprehensive historical narrative ranging from the Seleucid era to the Islamic conquest. The introduction is a manifesto that sets the pace and provides the necessary methodological framework for the whole work.

This volume, produced by the Oplontis Project, presents a long-awaited in-depth study of Villa A at Oplontis, modern Torre Annunziata, an important luxurious villa on the outskirts of Pompeii. This is an open access publication (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb90048.0001.001) of the American Council of Learned Societies in its Humanities E-Book series and is the first of three volumes that the Oplontis Project will produce.

In the field of Roman urbanism, a growing current of scholarship has concentrated on the passage of people, carts, goods, and animals through the city. The present volume aims to advance discussion by drawing together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to examine movement through specific topographical contexts of Rome, especially, though not exclusively, on certain orchestrated occasions, such as parades.

The bi-millennial celebration of the death of Augustus prompted the near republication (and enlargement) of articles published just three years earlier (JRA 24 [2011] 47–98), even though substantial new data were expected to arrive in the near future. The fascination with coincidences of dates is an old, but intensely modern, phenomenon, and its incentives for academic publications are troubling (see J. Rüpke, “Dies natalis, dies depositionis: Antike Elemente in der europäischen Gedächtniskultur,” in R. Helmstetter, H.

Using an approach that has become fashionable in archaeology, this book identifies social networks in later Bronze Age Italy (i.e., the Recent and Final Bronze Ages [RBA and FBA]), tracing their role in the formation of the peoples named in the ancient sources. It is very well written, wears its theoretical garb lightly, and has been well proofread.

This substantial book (449 pages) produced mixed reactions in this reader: positive in the prospect of a comprehensive survey across the archaeology of Malta through its long history, but negative in that one book by a single author specializing in Punic pottery (C. Sagona, The Archaeology of Punic Malta. Ancient Near Eastern Studies Suppl. 9 [Leuven 2002]) cannot cover adequately almost six millennia of archaeology. Can such a survey be modern and useful to current and future scholars? Will the title be on my students’ reading list? Yes, but no, are the answers.

The driving force behind Sulosky Weaver’s study of a cemetery at Kamarina on the southern coast of Sicily is familiar to anyone who works with skeletons in the classical world: a desire to unite the often disparate scholarly traditions of classics and anthropology. This book therefore ranges from ancient Greek eschatology to archaeological theories of burial, and from pots to people, in an attempt to draw together several lines of evidence to contribute to a deeper understanding of the biology, culture, and ritual of a fifth- to third-century B.C.E. necropolis.