American Journal of Archaeology

For more than 2,000 years, the city of Corinth has been defined in literature by its isthmus. That thin spit of land, barely 5.7 km wide at its narrowest, has served to characterize the city and its landscape. From the heights of Acrocorinth, the acropolis peak overlooking the Isthmus and surrounding territory, the topographic contrasts of the city and its territory are stark: a lowland corridor of plains framed by gulfs, hills, and vistas that seem to encompass all the varied landscapes of Greece. For ancient authors such as Thucydides (1.13.5), Cicero (Agr.

One of the great contributions archaeological survey has made to our understanding of prehistoric Crete has been the diverse picture of activity it has revealed on the margins of the main (lowland) agricultural zones. However, while we now know much more about when and where on the margins people were active, all too frequently we lack the excavated assemblages that would allow more secure insights into how such groups actually lived, subsisted, and interacted.

Prostitution is famously the world’s “oldest profession” and is ubiquitous in time and space. That it existed and even flourished in ancient Greece is extensively (and colorfully) attested by Xenarchos, Aeschines, Euboulos, and many other ancient observers. Archaeologists, however, encounter myriad difficulties when trying to identify actual sites of prostitution in antiquity.

The volume under review is beautifully illustrated with high-quality drawings, plans, and photographs and is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Minoan funerary practices. In keeping with the tradition of the site publications of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), the work undertaken in the Hagios Charalambos Cave is published in several volumes. This is the first of five volumes and deals with the excavation of the cave and the publication of the portable objects.

This handsome volume published by Oxbow Books is the proceedings of the Postgraduate Cypriot Archaeology (POCA) Conference at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, in October 2010, the 10th such meeting held.

Harmanşah develops a “critical archaeology of place” through an analysis of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age rock monuments in Turkey (2). Places, which are defined in this publication as deeply historical sites of cultural significance, memory, and belonging, have become obscured in a number of academic and global trends.

This monograph is the first scholarly work to explicitly consider the ascendance of the citadel amid the decline of villages in Early Bronze Age (EBA) Anatolia. It examines the divergent social worlds of these two settlement types in light of theoretical and methodological models, which diverge from the cultural-historical frameworks that have dominated Anatolian archaeology for decades.

The aim of this book, according to its author, is “to explore how governments in the Late Bronze Age, and especially the Assyrian state, made use of written instruments, and what effect this may have had on how they governed” (3). To accomplish this goal, Postgate analyzes the social and administrative contexts of the abundant primary sources, about half of which were published only in the last two decades. Postgate is one of the most influential specialists to work on ancient Assyria since its rediscovery in the mid 19th century.

The book is organized in seven chronologically ordered chapters sandwiched between introduction and conclusion; endnotes follow the text, before the bibliography and indices. Each chapter is built around a series of translations of text passages that offer opportunities to discuss various questions. This brief review can only touch on the central issues of what is presented and how it is dealt with, centering on “economic” issues.

Jenkins’ book is bound to raise hackles with many in the museum industry as well as others whose claims for the repatriation of objects in museum collections overseas she rejects. The book, the title of which aptly summarizes the content, is strident in tone and, in the context of the dominant discourse of the “New Museology” and of current museum practice, is perhaps deliberately provocative.