American Journal of Archaeology

Variegated terrain around the Mediterranean, together with plentiful sources of stone, led to early construction of stone steps: among the earliest are those at the Tarxien complex on Malta, dated to the late fourth millennium B.C.E. Staircases, as Hollinshead points out in this interesting and thoughtful study, seem to be an intuitive invention that suits the biomechanics of the human body by allowing efficient ascents and descents.

This welcome book is the English version of a monograph published in Polish in 2011. The author has been a significant voice in sympotic studies for more than a decade, and this project presents the full scope of his views on the early history and development of the symposion.

In the field of ancient history, the Seleucid empire still ranks among the less-studied subjects, even though there is an increasing tendency in recent years to pay more attention to the Diadochi empires. The Seleucid empire (311–64 B.C.E.) was unlike anything the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had seen, with the exception of both the Achaemenid empire and that of Alexander the Great.

“As for Tracheia, its coast is narrow and has no level ground, or scarcely any; and, besides that, it lies at the foot of the Taurus, which affords a poor livelihood” (H.L. Jones, trans., The Geography of Strabo. Vol. 6. Loeb Classical Library 223 [Cambridge, Mass. 1929] 327).

This book is the first comprehensive examination of Prepalatial and Protopalatial Minoan mortuary customs and is a must-read for anyone who is interested not only in these mortuary customs but also in Minoan society. While earlier works on this theme, such as Keith Branigan’s volumes in the 1970s and Jeffrey Soles’ in the 1980s and 1990s, focused on limited geographical areas, Legarra Herrero explores the evidence from the whole island and includes all recent discoveries and most of the publications.

This is the fourth report from the excavation of a Minoan-type peak sanctuary by the church of Ayios Georgios sto Vouno (St. George on the Mountain) on Kythera, on the hills above the long-lived (and for most of the time Minoan) settlement by the sea at Kastri. The first two reports (Y.

This volume is the result of three sessions at the European Association of Biblical Studies conferences held in Budapest and Vienna and a fourth meeting at the University of Münster between 2006 and 2009. It follows as a sequel to the publication of an initial conference held at Brown University in 2005 (J. Bodel and S. Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity [Malden, Mass. 2008]).

Traditional archaeological studies of mortuary contexts in the ancient Near East have tended to split along disciplinary divides, as publications often focus on either burial customs and material culture or the scientific study of biological material (e.g., S. Campbell and A. Green, eds., The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East [Oxbow 1995]). This sharp delineation has faded over the past decade partly because of the publication of works such as Bioarchaeology and Behavior: The People of the Ancient Near East (M.A. Perry, ed. [Gainesville, Fla.

The volume under review, a thought-provoking combination of mortuary analyses of archaeological finds on the one hand and contemporary materials on the other, is based on the author’s Ph.D. dissertation at Tel Aviv University.

The material covered in Wengrow’s short but ambitious volume was first presented within the M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) in 2011, and it is in many ways a tribute to both the wide-ranging work of the ISAW and of Rostovtzeff himself.