Story time

Bahn, Paul (ed.). Archaeology: the whole story. 2017. 574 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. London: Thames & Hudson; 978-0-500-29276-1 paperback £24.95.

Cline, Eric H.. Three stones make a wall: the story of archaeology. 2017. xix+455 pages, several b&w illustrations. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press; 978-0-691-16640-7 hardback $35.

Given the promise of its title, the obvious place for Crawford to start would be Archaeology: the whole story, edited by Paul Bahn. The latest archaeological offering from Thames and Hudson, this handsome, and heavy, tome gallops through four million years of human history in just shy of 600 gloriously illustrated pages, showcasing the breadth and diversity of archaeology through the juxtaposition of hundreds of sites, finds and debates.

The contents are organised into six chronologically defined sections, starting with ‘Deep prehistory’ and advancing through ‘Hunters to farmers’, ‘The rise of civilizations’, ‘The Iron Age and the ancient world’, ‘The medieval world’ and through to the ‘The modern world’. A short seventh and final section turns to ‘How archaeology works’. Within each of these sections, various geographic or cultural themes are briefly introduced, such as ‘Cave art’, ‘European megaliths’, ‘The Silk Road’, ‘Japan's Yayoi and Kofun periods’, ‘The Ottomans’ and ‘Shipwrecks’. These are followed by two or three case studies, each spread across two pages, focusing on individual sites, landscapes and discoveries. As would be expected from this publisher, the layout and design is excellent. The concise texts strike the right balance between detail and readability, and the visuals are well chosen, well reproduced and, well, abundant. Dozens of timelines attend to the reader's chronological needs. In contrast, their cartographical requirements may be less well served. Each of the six main sections starts with a world map locating the relevant places, but there are no larger-scale maps to situate the individual sites in their immediate contexts; for example, in relation to rivers, mountains or other sites. Nor are there many site plans either. Instead, the visual emphasis is squarely on the lavish photographs of structures and artefacts—and the book is worth the cover price for these alone.

A title such as The whole story almost invites the pedant to look for what is not included—I read it while in Shetland and so could not help but notice the absence of brochs—but, of course, no single book could tell the whole story in this sense. The geographic coverage has a certain Mediterranean and Near Eastern concentration, but there is very good representation of the Americas, Africa and South and East Asia too. The ‘modern world’ section covers the story from AD 1600 to the present, although it is comparatively short and shifts to a more thematic approach, including ‘Indigenous archaeology’ and ‘Archaeology and tourism’. Surprisingly, colonial archaeology receives almost no coverage, whether the early North American colonies, the plantations of the Caribbean or the trading sites of West Africa; the inclusion of a section on ‘Industrial archaeology’ only emphasises the absence. Such gaps notwithstanding, everything that might be expected is included—Tarxien, Mohenjo-daro, the Pyramids, the Terracotta Army, Cahokia, Great Zimbabwe, Machu Picchu—plus plenty of new ‘classics’: H. floresiensis, Denisovans, Göbekli Tepe, the Staffordshire Hoard and Richard III.

This volume's glossy looks should not deceive; it is not a coffee-table book, but nor does it replace its publisher's other classic student texts: Archaeology: theories, methods, and practice (Renfrew & Bahn Reference Renfrew and Bahn2016) and The human past (Scarre Reference Scarre2013). It does, however, complement them nicely. Certainly, if my students could recall a tenth of what is included, they would sail through their first-year exams.

Archaeology: the whole story covers the full gamut of the discipline, but, despite the subtitle, it is ultimately a series of episodes or chapters rather than an overarching narrative or story. For the latter, we can turn to Three stones make a wall: the story of archaeology, by Eric Cline. Based on the author's undergraduate ‘Introduction to archaeology’ class, the author gives his three motivations for writing a general introductory volume: to bring attention to new discoveries, to tackle pseudoarchaeology and to stress the need to protect cultural heritage.

Cline starts in the Preface with an autobiographical note on his childhood introduction to archaeology and about one of his early finds. This personal perspective runs through the subsequent chapters, as Cline links the story of archaeology to his own experiences of fieldwork, research and publication. The book proper gets going with a series of chapters on ‘Early archaeology and archaeologists’. It then turns from the history of archaeology to a section of chapters on the shift from ‘Early hominins to farmers’, and then four sections with chapters on regional archaeology: ‘Excavating the Bronze Age Aegean’, ‘Uncovering the classics’, ‘Discoveries in the Holy Land and beyond’ and ‘New World archaeology’. Interspersed between these sections are standalone chapters responding to the questions that Cline is often asked, such as ‘How do you know where to dig?’ and ‘Do you get to keep what you find?’.

Reflecting Cline's own area of expertise, many of the examples are located in the Eastern Mediterranean and, more specifically, the ‘Holy Land’. Hence, he discusses the discovery and exploration of classic sites including Troy, Mycenae, Delphi, Jericho, Megiddo and Masada. Integrated into the narrative are Marinatos's famous Reference Marinatos1939 Antiquity article, postulating the role of the Santorini eruption in the decline of Minoan Crete, and Cline's own prize-winning Antiquity article (Parcak et al. Reference Parcak, Gathings, Childs, Mumford and Cline2016) on looting in Egypt. In addition, there is also good coverage of North and Central America, including colonial Williamsburg and more-recent discoveries such as the Confederate submarine, H.L. Hunley, off the South Carolina coast. Covering, as it does, similar ground to The whole story, it is unsurprising that many of the same examples are featured; for example, Laetoli, Çatalhöyük, Ebla, Ötzi, Angkor, Copán and Mesa Verde, although there is comparatively less on Asia and Africa. Both books put Tutankhamun's mask upfront (The whole story on the cover, and Three stones make a wall on page 1)—nearly 100 years after Carter's discovery, King Tut has lost none of his allure. A key difference between the two books is that Three stones make a wall is presented as a narrative, linking the individual sites, archaeologists and debates to make broader points about the practice of archaeology and the nature of the human past. And, as such, Cline is able to arrive at some brief final thoughts about how archaeology might develop in the coming years and about how our own civilisation (should it merit such a term) might be interpreted by future archaeologists.

Compared with The whole story, Three stones make a wall feels a little old-fashioned in places; the mapping and the illustrations, for example, have a retro look, and the narrative is driven as much by personalities—Stephens and Catherwood, Schliemann, Yadin, and Bass and Pulak—as by themes (although for a biography, see below). Some sections bring to mind Ceram's (1952) phenomenally successful Gods, graves and scholars; indeed, Cline cites the volume as a childhood influence. The core cast of characters is remarkably similar: Evans, Champollion, Petrie, Carter and Woolley. Despite or because of this, Three stones make a wall offers a good read. I suspect, however, the classes on which it is based are even better. One can imagine, for example, that some of the jokes that fall a little flat on the page work just fine in the ‘Archaeology 101’ class. Indeed, on the basis of Three stones make a wall, I am sure that Cline's students have an inspirational start to their studies.

Impact and icebergs

Schiffer, Michael B.. Archaeology's footprints in the modern world. 2017. xxiv+397 pages, several b&w illustrations. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press; 978-1-60781-533-4 paperback $26.95.

Ingstad, Benedicte. A grand adventure: the lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and their discovery of a Viking settlement in North America. 2017. 455 pages, 12 colour and 58 b&w illustrations. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press; 978-0-7735-4968-5 hardback $39.95.

O.G.S. Crawford was very aware of the contradictions of studying the past during a period of rapid social and technological change. At the same time as expressing concerns about the threats to the archaeological record of modern life, he also embraced new types of archaeological evidence, such as abandoned aircraft. One new book he would therefore pick up with great interest is Michael Schiffer's Archaeology's footprints in the modern world.

In many respects, this book is aimed at a similar audience to the volumes discussed above, that is, “people who want to learn more about what archaeologists do and have done”, and Schiffer therefore “assumes that the reader has little knowledge of the subject” (p. xiii). Consequently, it takes a similar format to the other volumes, with brief case-study chapters, and there is some overlap in terms of content, such as the H.L. Hunley, the Igbo-Ukwo bronzes and Stonehenge. But there the similarities end.

Schiffer presents 42 case studies, each exemplifying a ‘footprint’ or impact that reaches out beyond the confines of the discipline. Many, but surely not all, of these examples will be familiar to professional archaeologists. What is refreshing here is the way in which Schiffer paints a rather different, or at least more expansive, picture of archaeology compared with the previous volumes. Site biographies and tales of heroic deeds in the field are complemented by an energising range of examples showing how archaeology intersects with the wider world. The case studies are grouped into 14 sections, each with a short introduction (there is a bit of repetition, but it serves to draw out the connections between the otherwise separate case-study chapters within). These sections include: ‘Collaborating with communities’, ‘Pursuing an activist agenda’, ‘Reviving ancient technologies’, ‘Participating in judicial and diplomatic processes’ and ‘Bolstering biological sciences’.

The individual case studies include research on the archaeology of homelessness, the revival of raised-bed agriculture in the Andes, the marketing of obsidian tools to surgeons and the study of gut microbiota from coprolites. Rathje's ‘Garbage Project’ and its contribution to the wider field of material culture studies naturally features, as do accounts of the role of Roman glass in research on nuclear waste disposal and the discovery that Maya blue is, against received wisdom, an organic compound new to science. There are also plenty of examples of the role of archaeologists in relation to protecting cultural heritage and collaborating with local communities to present discoveries, or to help revitalise and promote social, political and economic fortunes. Schiffer also includes the example of early electric cars (based on his own research), and the value of a careful study of the technologies and the social contexts in which they are, or are not, adopted; although done over 20 years ago, this work is still of direct relevance today. The recent developments at the Stonehenge World Heritage Site also come in for praise as an example of investment in cultural tourism and heritage awareness, although the A303 has not been rerouted, as claimed on p. 64: the UK government announced this September the intention to move ahead with the tunnel option.

It is striking that many of these examples end with only partially successful outcomes; hence, surgeons have not adopted obsidian tools (they require new ways of working), raised-bed agriculture turns out to be unviable in a wage-labour market and authorities have ignored careful archaeological studies when building reconstructions such as that at Kourion. In other hands, these might have been portrayed as failures, yet Schiffer strikes a positive tone and effectively communicates the social, economic and political value of archaeology without sounding—as is sometimes the case with the growing need to demonstrate research ‘impact’—desperate to justify the discipline's relevance. The one thing that is missing, however, is a conclusion. Having excited the reader's imagination with almost four dozen case studies, the book comes to abrupt end with a chapter on ‘The urban revolution’. Carried along on Schiffer's measured enthusiasm, I wanted some final thoughts. Still, if I were to have to choose just one of these introductory volumes for the novice archaeologist in my life, I think Schiffer would pip the others to the post—partly for his clear and concise style, and partly for his compelling vision of a discipline that is not only interesting in its own right, but also of broader value and relevance.

One of the many examples that appears in both Archaeology: the whole story and Archaeology's footprints (a Venn diagram might have been appropriate at this point) is the site of L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. When Crawford died in 1957, there was not a shred of archaeological evidence for the Viking settlement of North America. Within a decade, however, the discovery and excavation of L'Anse aux Meadows would change all that. Our resurrected Crawford would therefore reach with amazement for A grand adventure: the lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and their discovery of a Viking settlement in North America, penned by their daughter, Benedicte Ingstad. This is a fascinating and compelling account to read alongside the brief vignettes of the site and its exploration offered in the volumes by Bahn and Schiffer. It also offers something of a contrast to the tales of discovery in the hot and dusty biblical lands described by Cline; instead, we are confronted with icebergs and the windswept landscapes of the North Atlantic.

A grand adventure is an abridged and translated version of two books originally published in Norwegian. Benedicte Ingstad's account of her parents’ lives and the discovery of the Viking settlement on the northern tip of Newfoundland draws on an extensive archive of documents (“at least forty shelves of boxes containing their sorted and filed records”), as well as “memories I have that are not included in any books or records: all the trips, all the conversations around the kitchen table, and all the times my parents and I spent together” (p. 5). Indeed, the author was present at many of the key moments described. She is not, therefore, an entirely independent witness to the many extraordinary events that unfolded during the 1960s and 1970s, but her personal insights shed new light on the people and places involved.

The narrative unfolds chronologically, charting the early life of her father, Helge, and then introducing her mother, Anne Stine, some 18 years his junior. The first half of the book focuses on Helge's work in Arctic Canada and amongst the Apache. But the archaeological audience will be most interested in the second half of the book where attention turns to the Ingstads’ search for Leif Eiriksson's Vinland, the latter documented in the Viking sagas.

The brief accounts of L'Anse aux Meadows in the other volumes discussed here credit Helge and Anne Stine equally with the discovery and excavation of the site, and there is little indication of the controversies, public and private, that played out at the time. For as soon as the results of the initial work were announced in 1961, various disputes broke out; some rumbled on for decades. The chapter and section titles attest to the ongoing scholarly, personal and political frictions: ‘Envy, intrigue, and further expeditions’, ‘A crisis is brewing’, ‘New storms’ and the ‘The ‘last straw’ of conflict’. Had, for example, the Danish archaeologist Meldgaard told the ‘amateur’ Helge Ingstad where to look for the site? There were disagreements with Parks Canada over the site's management and excavation. And there were many who did not at first accept the evidence for a Viking settlement, and even accusations of falsification. Alongside these public disputes, Benedicte recounts the personal effects of the controversies swirling around her parents. These include the sense of injustice at their marginalisation as the significance of the find became clear, and, for her mother specifically, the way that her role was consistently downplayed. Anne Stine was the qualified archaeologist—not Helge—and Benedicte recounts that while her mother could live without the media attention focused on her father, she took exception to her role as the project archaeologist being misattributed to Helge.

By the time L'Anse aux Meadows was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1978, the Ingstads’ involvement with the site had reached a nadir; attending the official ceremony to mark the site's inscription, Helge was relegated to the back row “where no one took the slightest notice: he who had discovered the settlement and led the expeditions [. . .] My father was furious” (p. 381). It seems, however, that by the time the museum was opened at the site just five years later, there had been a significant shift in attitudes, starting a trend that would accelerate through to the end of the Ingstads’ lives and on to the present. At first this recognition was focused on Helge: the invitations to speak and the honorary degrees. Gradually, however, Anne Stine's role was also recognised in its own right. Nonetheless, controversies carried on into Helge's later life, such as when, for example, he became embroiled in a dispute over the fate of the Greenland Norse with fellow Norwegian, Thor Heyerdahl (“It was inevitable that they would meet. A country as small as Norway does not foster many famous men who live at the same time”, p. 388).

The final chapters move onto ‘Life after Vinland’ and ‘Old age’, recounting the Ingstads’ growing recognition and, finally, national and international reverence. Anne Stine, although much younger than her husband, died before him, and it was therefore only Helge who travelled to Washington D.C. in 2000 to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of Leif Eiriksson's arrival in North America; Helge died the following year. The final chapter, ‘Legacy’, recounts how the Ingstads’ reputations have continued to grow since their deaths. As a result of the many events to which their daughter has been invited during that time, Benedicte herself appears to have laid various things to rest—the terrible rift with Parks Canada, in particular, has been healed through the full recognition of her parents’ pioneering roles in the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows.

This is a fascinating account of one of the big archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. The biographical form offers insights into the motivations and struggles behind the official accounts and newspaper headlines. Although many of the events are well within living memory, it evokes a very different world from that of today: of personal expeditions and adventure, and of scholarly disputes conducted by letter and through the mainstream press. Whether every individual and institution featuring in the book would agree with how they are represented is difficult to guess. But the lasting impression is of the personal costs. The constant criss-crossing of the Atlantic by air and sea for fieldwork and meetings would be gruelling even today (Benedicte recalls how “Once during this scouting trip, while high in the air, we felt the plane's engine sputter and stop [. . .] everything went completely silent as the propeller stood motionless in front of us”, p. 295). The real impact, however, was psychological; it is clear that the discovery and its aftermath was an exhilarating but also exhausting, even traumatising, time. The account is something of an emotional rollercoaster—there are real highs and lows, but ultimately it is a tale of redemption and reconciliation—the restoration of her parents’ reputations and the author coming to terms with her parents’ public and personal lives. An informative and engrossing volume for anyone interested in Norse archaeology and the history of archaeology more generally.

Big History and biomolecules

Cunliffe, Barry. On the ocean: the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from prehistory to AD 1500. 2017. vii+631 pages, numerous colour illustrations. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-875789-4 hardback £30.

Pollard, A. Mark, Heron, Carl & Armitage, Ruth Ann. Archaeological chemistry. 2016. xxii+585 pages, several b&w illustrations. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry; 978-1-78262-426-4 hardback £44.99.

Other books that Crawford might pick up with interest include Barry Cunliffe's latest blockbusting synthesis, On the ocean: the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from prehistory to AD 1500. Hot on the heels of By steppe, desert and ocean (2015), which took in a geographic sweep from China to Europe, this time Cunliffe turns towards the setting sun with a narrative linking the long-term history of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. He has, of course, sailed similar waters before with some of his earlier books; the twin novelties here are the incorporation of a larger geographic canvas—taking in the Atlantic coasts of Africa and North America—and a focus on the emotional and technological aspects of human interactions with the sea.

Cunliffe begins with questions about why humans—a species that evolved on land—should have taken early and repeatedly to the seas with all the many risks which that entailed: “What is it about the sea that so fascinates and entices humans into acts of irrationality?” (p. 1). Could it be, he wonders, 550 pages later, the ‘wanderlust’ gene, DRD4-7R? In between, the narrative takes in deep geological history, the nature of winds, tides and currents, the night sky, the peopling of islands and coastal areas and details of ship- and boat-building technology. The account is chronological, moving back and forth between the Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe, until the historical canvas expands sufficiently to draw them into a single thread. The prehistoric, classical and early historical periods are solidly archaeological, informed by the textual sources as available; the last few chapters adopt a more conventional historical format and make less use of archaeological evidence; for example, from coastal West Africa.

The very different natures of the two seas, and the human responses to them, are a recurring theme. With the journeys of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Gibraltar Straits, and beyond, the Mediterranean became “familiar [and] offered little challenge to seafarers” (p. 558). But it was not until two and a half millennia later that Magellan passed through the straits that now bear his name and “the endless Ocean Sea [i.e the Atlantic], had at last been contained” (p. 549)—will Cunliffe's next offering expand his canvas still further to take in the Pacific that lay beyond?

The book adopts a familiar format to Cunliffe's other recent volumes and supplies everything we have come to expect. It is hugely ambitious in scope, fluently written and beautifully illustrated with panoramic photographs of landscapes and monuments, plus trademark mapping. A nice twist here is the orientation of the maps, with west to the top of the page; this is intended “to jolt us out of our comfortable geographical complacency [by] giving primacy to the setting sun”; for “people living along the Atlantic façade it conforms to the natural orientation of their world” (p. vi). This intentional ‘dis-orientation’ of the reader is very effective, although it underplays the north-south variability of ecotones within the Atlantic and Baltic zones (e.g. fig. 2.7); it is, after all, the relative ecological homogeneity of the Mediterranean that helps to explain its early ‘containment’ compared with the Atlantic containment. And, of course, part of that containment was the Viking settlement of North America, so L'Anse aux Meadows is duly featured, as are a host of other discoveries and developments that would be entirely new to Crawford, from the growing evidence for human activity on Cyprus as early as the eleventh millennium BC through to the Viking ships at Roskilde.

One area of archaeology on which Crawford would need to do much catching up is archaeological science; the third edition of Archaeological chemistry, by Pollard, Heron and Armitage, would provide him with a comprehensive update. As the authors note, however, so much has changed since the second edition, published 10 years ago, that in fact we all need an update.

The book begins with a fascinating introductory chapter on ‘The development of archaeological chemistry’, looking back to its origins in the late eighteenth century, before the substantial Chapter 2 turns to the technicalities, laying out the scientific principles underpinning core analytical techniques. The following chapters are then structured around the analysis of specific materials, presenting both the underlying science and examples of applications; these include the characterisation of obsidian, clays, glass, metals and resins. There are also chapters on the isotope analysis of human bone for the reconstruction of diet and mobility (or the ‘provenancing’ of humans) and on biomolecules, focusing on lipids, especially in relation to dairying. A new chapter for this edition covers proteins (‘From blood on stones to proteomics’). One area that is resolutely not included is ancient DNA, or palaeogenomics, considered too specialised and fast-moving to be dealt with satisfactorily here.

I confess that a lot of the technical detail goes well beyond my schoolboy science. For those similarly afflicted, it will be the sections on the application rather than the important underlying principles that are most useful. For example, I had recently had cause to wonder about the effects of recycling on the results of glass provenancing. It turns out that the presence in coloured glass of antimony and manganese in tiny amounts above background levels may suggest the recycling of cullet; this is because producers added these elements to decolourise glass, so their presence in coloured glass can be assumed to indicate a recycled glass mix.

Another insight, in the ‘Proteomics’ chapter, includes the potential contamination by coffee or Coca-Cola of Hemastix®, originally developed to identify blood in urine and subsequently used for the detection of blood on stone tools. The risk of false positives is significant and, although these problems have been long known, this method apparently continues to be used by some archaeologists today. Pollard et al. argue that at a minimum there must be follow-up analysis, such as mass spectrometry, to confirm results, just as there is in forensic science: “quality assurance should not be thrown aside just because the lives and deaths being investigated occurred in the archaeological past” (p. 510). The ‘Proteomics’ chapter is also a good example of the challenges generally faced by archaeological scientists. Not only is the science rapidly developing, but the samples that they are compelled to use “are far from ideal from the analytical point of view—small, fragmentary, and, particularly in the case of biological samples, considerably degraded” (p. 16).

Taking stock of the field, and looking ahead, the authors argue that archaeological science must be evermore closely integrated within the wider discipline and its research questions: “It does not require advanced analytical instrumentation to demonstrate that pottery is made primarily of clay!” (p. 536). And they perceive a greater willingness of archaeological scientists to look at the social context of past technologies and to engage with, for example, material culture theory. In this regard, it is gratifying to see the recent series of Antiquity papers on the Stonehenge bluestones featured as an example of the application of archaeological chemistry “to answer ‘real’ questions” (p. 539). In some research areas, such as isotope analysis, archaeological science is driving the wider agenda. Conversely, the authors detect the need for archaeological scientists to contribute directly to other historical sciences: “It does, for example, rather seem that the term ‘the Anthropocene’ is being developed and applied in Quaternary geology with too little input from archaeologists” (p. 537). Interestingly, given the collaborative nature of archaeological science (witness the author lists on many of the articles cited), they observe the dependency of much work on individual scholars and the lack of the institutional infrastructure to continue research in their absence.

Given the accelerating pace of scientific developments, and their rapid and varied archaeological application, we can presumably expect the fourth edition of Archaeological chemistry to arrive in less than the decade that separates the second and third editions. Meanwhile, there is plenty for us, let alone Crawford, to catch up on in this edition.

Paper and pixels

With this issue of NBC, my tenure as Reviews Editor comes to an end. It has been a privilege to see books on every aspect of archaeology arriving daily in the Antiquity office, and to have the opportunity to commission reviews and to offer my own thoughts on a selection. I am enormously grateful to all those reviewers who have responded to an invitation out of the blue to review for Antiquity, and who have tolerated with good grace the chasing emails and the edits to their texts.

In a discipline where the monograph retains a central position in the publishing landscape, book reviews serve an important role. The aim of the Antiquity reviews section is to feature relatively short reviews, as soon as possible after publication, to cover a diversity of periods, regions, approaches and different publication formats, and to communicate with the widest archaeological audience. As well as providing critical evaluation of the individual books, and promoting greater awareness of their contents, the juxtaposition of such a broad selection of books also allows us to see which ideas and themes crosscut archaeology's many sub-disciplines, and those which do not.

On the subject of different publication formats, one area of development over the past five years is e-publication. CD-ROMs are still to be found in pockets at the back of books (e.g. the JADE2 volumes reviewed in this issue), but while the technology has proven more persistent than microfiche, presumably it is destined to go the same way eventually. Some publications have developed hybrid models, such as the Petra Great Temple volume (also reviewed in this issue), combining a gold-standard print monograph with an online database. And still other volumes, such as A mid-Republican house from Gabii (Optiz et al. Reference Opitz, Mogetta and Terrenato2016), reviewed in the October issue by Stefano Campana (Reference Campana2017), are entirely online, making full use of the possibilities of HTML. The latter notwithstanding, it is perhaps testament to archaeologists’ fascination with material culture that the ‘real thing’ remains so dominant; it is certainly interesting to see the enthusiasm for the print copies of Antiquity on display at our conference stands.

In reality, digital and print each offer their own pros and cons. As demonstrated by several of the books reviewed here, the rise of the e-book has been paralleled by the efforts of many publishers to put new emphasis on the design and quality of their print books. And there is no substitute for ‘getting to know’ a book and sensing one's progress through its pages. Yet, as Esmonde Cleary's (Reference Esmonde Cleary2017) recent Antiquity review of the 800-page An urban geography of the Roman world (Hanson Reference Hanson2016) points out, when that subject matter includes an appendix of almost 1400 sites with tens of thousands of pieces of information, the ability to search systematically through an electronic version is highly desirable. In this particular case, the publisher, Archaeopress, also offers an e-book (pdf) of the volume that provides an enhanced level of searchability when compared with the print version; this has now been subsequently supplemented by online access to the full database (oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/cities). And, of course, a pdf is more portable than an 800-page book and does not fill up precious office shelf space. The downside is that virtual volumes do not have a material ‘presence’. With over 300 review books arriving in the Antiquity office each year, print copies make it much easier to get a handle on the variety of what has arrived, the contents of individual books and an idea for who might review them; the physical presence of a book ‘demands’ attention in a way that an e-book does not. As with other aspects of material culture, therefore, the digital does not directly replace the ‘real thing’—indeed, it may lead to the revival or enhanced status of the ‘original’, what Sax (Reference Sax2016) calls ‘The revenge of analog’. Rather, print and digital each offer something different, and, as with the example of Hanson's (Reference Hanson2016) An urban geography, that means we may end up wanting or needing both.

Finally, in signing off, it is a great pleasure to introduce my successor as Reviews Editor, Dan Lawrence, a Near Eastern landscape archaeologist based at Durham University. The readers of the Antiquity reviews section will be in capable hands; I hope he finds the role as stimulating and rewarding as I have!