American Journal of Archaeology

Comparison is a complicated task. Done well, it dusts off our perceptions, opens new pathways for investigation, and makes one field or topic accessible to scholars of another. It offers a healthy response to the hypercritical, positivistic approaches that can come from too narrowly relying on one case study or specialization; it is often the unexamined cousin of the interdisciplinarity that has become the de rigueur claim for relevance in the academic world. The risks of comparison are as substantial, however, as the rewards.

This book provides a long-overdue synthesis of Sardinia’s Nuragic era, named after the roughly 7,000 monumental stone towers, or nuraghi, located throughout the island. It is an introductory treatise that builds on the author’s prior monograph on the subject (A Prehistory of Sardinia 2300–500 B.C. Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 5 [Sheffield, England 1996]).

This volume is both a study of Hellenistic bronze sculpture and a catalogue of an exhibition that traveled from Florence to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., between the summers of 2015 and 2016. As the editors of the book (also curators of the exhibition) state, the purpose of the exhibition was to bring together (for the first time) enough bronze sculpture of the highest quality and comparable monumentality from a wide enough geographical and temporal range to begin to deconstruct the aura of specialness and “splendid isolation” that follows bronze.

Since 1970, the International Congress on Ancient Bronzes has been held 19 times, most recently at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2015 where, as always, it attracted experts in many specializations. Usually an exhibition is held in conjunction with a bronze congress, as with Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World (J. Daehner and K. Lapatin, eds. [Los Angeles 2015]). Lehmann did not attend that bronze congress.

This volume, derived from three workshops held in France in 2011 through 2013, was generated by the editor’s desire to reconsider the official date assigned to Temple A of Leto at the Letoon in Xanthos. His original agenda receives little explication here, but the project led to this thorough exploration of a phase that is customarily paired with the subsequent century or so as Hellenistic.

This weighty tome is a revised edition of Badoud’s doctoral thesis, submitted to the Uni­versities of Neuchâtel and Bordeaux III in 2007. It reassesses the chronology of the inscriptions of Rhodes and its Peraia after the synoikism of Ialysos, Kameiros, and Lindos, dated by the author to 408 B.C.E. Its aim is to throw new light on the history and institutions of the Rhodian state.

Wilson Jones attempts a holistic approach to the age-old question of the origin of the Greek temple and its orders, to examine it not only in the context of architectural history but as part of the broad religious, cultural, and artistic context in which the temple emerged. It is an ambitious undertaking, made even more challenging by the author’s choice to follow a thematic rather than chronological approach to the issues. A preface and introductory chapter lay out Wilson Jones’ basic goal and his approach to it.

This long and leisurely book is significant for its insistence that one must understand the imagery on Greek painted pottery against the background of Greek literature, and for its strong case for the imaginative playfulness of painters of black- and particularly red-figure pottery at Athens rendering problematic the assumption that images on pots illustrate life. These points are well worth making, but Hedreen’s methodology raises serious questions.

The publication of the “temple below the hill” at Kition-Bamboula is a rewarding and beautiful book. The authors begin with a history of the excavations at this important site, most notably under the British mandate, when much of the hill was removed to fill swamps during a malarial epidemic in 1879. Subsequently, numerous artifacts were brought to the British Museum from the hill. Among them were an inscription in Phoenician referring to a “Temple of Astarte” and a royal inscription of King Milkyaton of Kition.

Climate and Ancient Societies is a wide-ranging contribution to the discourse on ancient climate change and the responses of (mostly) prehistoric communities and societies to it, containing papers from a workshop held in Denmark in 2009. The editors situate the book as a contribution to contemporary debates on climate change and environmental problems; they argue that archaeology is relevant to the present and future and has, with its longue durée perspectives, “much to bring to the table” (24).