American Journal of Archaeology

Ostia, the harbor city of ancient Rome, has long drawn the attention of Roman archaeologists. Ostia is one of the most extensively excavated and well-preserved cities in the Roman West, and, as such, has long played an important role in our understanding of urban infrastructure and daily life. For many decades, archaeological work at Ostia has been focused toward the city’s Early Republican and Imperial-period history, overlooking the site’s rich Late Antique archaeology and development.

Objects manufactured within the Roman provinces often appear in archaeological contexts from beyond the frontiers of the empire. Some local productions from the same areas make use of technologies developed within the empire and/or seem to refer stylistically to objects made in the Roman provinces. As Wells notes in his introduction to this volume of papers, which derives from a panel at the 2010 Roman Archaeology Conference in Oxford, these linked phenomena have long been known and documented.

Since the studies on the Celsus Library in Ephesus, which opened new perspectives on the architecture of ancient libraries in general, several buildings had been identified as libraries based on specific features. The inscription names the function of the Celsus Library, and as a consequence the building provides fundamental information on the typology of ancient libraries in general: the main room has a rectangular form and three entrances and consists of a reading room, windows, a podium, and niches for bookcases, with access to the galleries and bookcases on the upper floor.

Although studies of monumental fountains of the Roman era have been abundant in recent decades, this is the first monograph to approach the genre principally from a functional standpoint with full attention to such matters as water systems, urban context, and practical utility. Prior studies, Richard argues, have relied too much on formal typology, dissolving fountains into mere ensembles of architectural components or isolating them from their urban contexts (1–14).

The fortifications of Crete are a persistent part of the island’s landscape, visible today looming over headlands and crossing hillsides, yet they had received little scholarly attention until this publication of Coutsinas’ copious research in 2013. This book focuses on the classical and Hellenistic fortifications of Crete, the periods when such defensive structures were most necessary; the coming of the Romans in ca. 67 B.C.E. brought centuries of internecine warfare and strife to an end.

This is the latest volume in the excellent series of publications of the finds from the Athenian Agora. It catalogues figured tombstones from the Classical to the Roman periods. Archaic finds are in Agora 11 (E.B. Harrison, Archaic and Archaistic Sculpture [Princeton 1965]), and some tombstones have been published elsewhere. The introductory section gives a history of the scholarship on grave monuments (ch. 1); a reasonably comprehensive survey of funerary sculpture in Athens (ch.

When it comes to the common Attic vase shape known as the lekythos, scholars have fixated on those produced in the special technique of white ground, the imagery of which is largely funerary and whose distribution was mostly limited to Attica. Thus, red-figure lekythoi have not received the attention they deserve for their more varied iconography, their wider distribution in the Mediterranean, and their role in Greek daily life.

In her introductory comments on “The Markets of Fine Wares,” Tsingarida refers to “a recent paper” (116) (M. Lawall, “Ceramics and Positivism Revisited: Greek Transport Amphoras and History,” in H. Parkins and C. Smith, eds., Trade, Traders and the Ancient City [London 1998] 75–101), in which I observed that transport amphoras were better indications of trade than fine wares because the latter were linked only to a narrow sector of the economy. The original date of publication (not the 2005 reprint cited by Tsingarida) is important.

The book under review is the third volume in the Gösta Enbom Monographs series, which focuses on the research of transport amphoras and trade in Cyprus to provide new information on the economic history of the island. Lawall and Lund, the organizers of the Canadian and Danish Institutes at Athens workshop and also the editors of the volume, are scholars with great experience and knowledge of transport amphora issues and the economic dimensions they bring to the study of the ancient societies.