American Journal of Archaeology

This volume is a collection of papers from a European Science Foundation workshop at the University of Oxford in March 2009. It offers a multidisciplinary look at the role of temples in creating elite identity in the Near East and Egypt from the Early Iron Age to the Roman period. Frood and Raja consider these spatial and temporal boundaries to be fluid, however, and some of the papers transcend them, focusing on the Bronze Age or the central Mediterranean (5; cf. 32). The collection proceeds from broad topics to more specific ones.

Hadjinikolaou’s book is a comprehensive study on cults of gods and heroes in the area of ancient Upper Macedonia, comprising the western part of the modern Greek region of western Macedonia and the southwestern part of FYROM. It mainly covers material dating from the Hellenistic period to late antiquity, although research is not limited to a specific time span.

This volume contains a final report on the first of several Late Hellenistic buildings excavated on the small island of Mochlos in northeast Crete by a Greek-American team in 1989–1994, 2005–2006, 2009–2010, and 2012. The Hellenistic settlement on Mochlos, lasting less than a century, was short-lived in comparison with nearly 1,800 years of Bronze Age occupation; nevertheless, the Hellenistic remains are extensive and denote a flourishing settlement within the circuit wall.

The proceedings from a colloquium held in Lyon in January 2012 focus on results from excavations in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Claros and an underwater excavation at Kızılburun associated with the sanctuary by its finds. Ten studies in French and five in English are presented by the excavators and invited experts, covering three broad aspects of the project: the topography and architecture, the objects, and the oracles.

This book is unfinished. Gruben’s untimely death left a quandary to Kienast, then-director of the Samos excavations. Gruben started at Samos in 1953, reconstructing the capitals of the second Temple of Hera for his dissertation. At many times during his distinguished career of scholarship on Greek architecture, he returned to Samos to prepare a comprehensive study of the monument. Concerted work starting in 1995 was cut short by his death in 2003.

This book is ambitious, timely, and the product of a huge amount of diligent research. Although I am no expert on the arcana of Greek dress and personal adornment, Lee clearly has read, absorbed, and considered at length almost everything published on the subject. (Some rare omissions are noted below; and unfortunately, M.

The consumption of goods in the ancient Mediterranean and Europe has been a frequent subject of discourse among scholars both past and present. The pottery manufactured in Greece has long received the lion’s share of attention as a product consumed by other cultures. This volume is no exception, yet it clearly defines the social significance of such imports and employs new geospatial methods to explore the role of Greek vessels consumed in distant lands.

The volume under review is the most recent contribution to the series published by the Archaeological Society at Athens presenting the results of research carried out in the extra-urban sanctuary site at Kato Syme in East Crete. It is written in English, with a Greek summary.

The editor, Jerome Pollitt, hardly needs to justify the issuing of this splendidly formatted book: there simply is no overview of ancient “mural and panel painting” (ix) that encompasses the entire Mediterranean world of antiquity—that is, from the Minoan palaces in Crete, via archaic and classical painting (very scanty remains) toward Hellenistic painting in Greece and Italy. The Roman era is well represented also, and the volume finishes with some examples of Early Christian paintings.

Interpersonal violence, one of the darker facets of human society, is pervasive, and its vestiges have been observed in skeletal remains dating as early as 36,000 years ago. Traditionally, there have been two approaches to the study of violence in human remains, that of bioarchaeology and that of forensic anthropology. Both are subdisciplines of biological anthropology: bioarchaeology combines the analysis of human bones with the reconstruction of the archaeological context, while forensic anthropology analyzes human bones within a recent historical or contemporary setting.