American Journal of Archaeology

Despite the challenges of building development and other threats to its urban heritage, scholarly interest in the medieval archaeology of modern Istanbul—the Byzantine Constantinople or “megapolis” of this book—remains unabated. The past two decades have witnessed symposia on the subject convened in Istanbul and elsewhere, as well as the publication of conference proceedings, monographs, archaeological reports, exhibition catalogues, journal articles, and even imaginative walking guides and websites.

The site of Khirbet et-Tannur (“Ruins of the Oven”) lies immediately southeast of the Dead Sea and 70 km north of Petra on an isolated peak, a promontory between the Wadi al-Hasa (the biblical Zered) and its major southern affluent, the Wadi al-Laban. It is on the King’s Highway, the major north–south route east of the Dead Sea; the Via Nova Traiana passed 4 km to the east. Khirbet et-Tannur was a Nabataean temple complex, an outlier of the village of Khirbet edh-Dharih, which lies at a spring 7 km south.

This volume is the revised and expanded version of Zarmakoupi’s 2007 doctoral dissertation at Oxford University. It follows by four years the publication of her edited volume on one of the key monuments she discusses here: The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum: Archaeology, Reception, and Digital Reconstruction (New York 2010).

The impressive artifacts recovered from the eighth-century B.C.E. Tomb of the Warrior at Tarquinia (Lazio, Italy) have long been touchstones for comparative descriptions of material culture from throughout Etruria as well as other areas in the Etruscan trading sphere. The authors of this massive volume have brought together 30 other specialists to provide an unparalleled examination of the spectacular tomb, including the history of its discovery, detailed study of the artifacts, and evaluations of their relationships with material culture of that period.

The physical evidence available for understanding the earliest phases of the city of Rome has grown rapidly in recent years. At the same time, a number of regional archaeological projects in Latium have added to our understanding of how the areas around Rome developed. Fulminante’s new book aims to bring together this wide array of data within a theoretical model that can explain the beginnings of urban society in Rome and Latium.

The study of Italian urbanism has witnessed a dynamic period of renewed interest in recent years, fueled by a wealth of new information from excavation, geophysical research, scientific analysis, and regional survey that has called many long-standing theories into question. At the same time, new methodologies, a changing regional focus, and a general reassessment of the central questions of ancient urbanism itself have led to richly varied scholarship. This edited volume explores and illustrates the current state of research on Italian urbanism in the first millennium B.C.E.

This publication, the third in the series on the chora of Metaponto, is a comprehensive compilation of survey work and analysis that spans decades of field research in the territory of the Greek polis. The work aims to trace the use of the territory across nearly a millennium of occupation, from the foundation of the Greek city to Roman occupation.

It is a distinct challenge to produce a guide to a museum collection, or as in this case a portion of such a collection, that both gives that corpus of objects the attention it deserves and provides the reader with a thorough, current, and accurate account of the category of artifact under consideration. In this modestly sized but beautifully illustrated volume, Mattusch, the most innovative and important scholar of ancient bronzes today, manages to provide even the most uninitiated reader with a comprehensive understanding of a subject fraught with complexity and controversy.

This comprehensive account of the little-known, partially excavated temple and sanctuary of Artemis Tauropolos at modern Loutsa (ancient Halai Araphenides) on the east coast of Attica incorporates intriguing literary testimonia with fragmentary physical remains, including monumental architecture, inscriptions, ceramics, and small finds.

Cline’s book is something special in ancient history writing—a popular best seller with academic credentials. This may be surprising, given that its subject is the history of the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and, in particular, the collapse of kingdoms and empires therein around the end of the 13th and the early 12th centuries B.C.E.—not, one might think, evidently mistakenly, a popular subject.