This volume is about the development of the collection of antiquities at the American Academy at Rome (henceforth AAR) and about some of the best artefacts in the collection. It is not, as might be understood from the title, a comprehensive catalogue of that collection. The articles by some distinguished authors are divided into two sections. Part 1 addresses American habits of collecting antiquities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 focuses on the different types of material represented in the AAR collection and discusses the highlights. While some of the collection is already published, this is the first overview of the creation and contents of the collection. It follows on the heels of several similar publications about the formation of foreign schools of classical archaeology in Athens and Rome and is a welcome addition to the growing literature examining the development of antiquities collections in European and American institutions.

R. De Puma's opening article situates the acquisition of Italian antiquities in a wider context by considering the priorities of collectors, tourists and philanthropists in the United States, and B. and N.’s contribution continues the theme by examining the connections between the AAR and museums and universities in the US. Together these articles reveal how small a circle of influential classicists were working to establish classical archaeology in America in the late nineteenth century. However, the second article would have worked better as a general introduction, something missing from this volume. Another topic which could have been usefully mentioned by way of introduction is a brief account of the way in which the AAR developed, from the opening of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome in 1895 to its merging with the School of Fine Arts (previously the American School of Architecture) in 1913 in order to create the AAR. This complicated history is conveyed only by scattered references throughout the volume (pp. 21, 41, 69–71, 91, 113 n. 3).

K. Geffcken's contribution is the high point of Part 1. She meticulously pieces together a jigsaw of archival and published evidence, and personal reminiscences, to reveal the personalities who shaped the institution. She dwells on key figures in the history of the school: director Richard Norton, son of Charles Norton, the founder of the Archaeological Institute of America and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; Albert Van Buren and his wife Elizabeth Douglas Van Buren; Arthur Frothingham Jnr; Thomas Ashby; Esther Van Deman. She also mentions as more minor characters some people who are now household names in Classical studies (e.g. James Loeb). Her biographical approach shows how personal and political events, such as the relationship between Italy and the Ottomans in the nineteenth century or the deprivation experienced by Americans in Italy during World War II, shaped the lives of individuals and also affected the way in which the collections were formed.

This story gives an insight into the nature of antiquities collection from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Tales of the treasure-hunting exploits of Norton seem shocking today, but were common in that period, as recounted by the Ashmolean Museum keeper of the time, D. Hogarth (p. 32). Frothingham's encounter with the Italian archaeological service in the late nineteenth century reveals some of the bureaucracy which still governs foreign-led excavations (pp. 55–6). The decision in the late 1940s by the Professor-in-charge to make space by discarding the unidentified and unidentifiable scraps and ‘aesthetically unappealing’ duplicates, which had accumulated in the collection, by throwing them into the Tiber (after they had been recorded in the AAR ledgers) is shown to be the result of careful deliberation and an attempt not to contaminate the archaeological record for the future, since the Tiber bed had already been investigated (pp. 79–80). Controversial as this action was, it raises the problematic issue of how to deal with an ever increasing amount of archaeological material and only finite storage resources. It would have been good to see mention of the current issues surrounding antiquities collecting and how these have affected the acquisitions of the AAR, as a way of rounding off the discussion of the development of the collections.

Part 2 deals with the current collection of the AAR. The editors explain that they were originally intending to create a comprehensive catalogue, but it proved more practical to leave this to an online database hosted by the AAR (p. 85). Unfortunately, at the time of writing this database is not yet fit for this purpose, lacking both search facility and some basic object information – for example a Cycladic figurine, titled ‘Island Statuette’, gives no indication that it is from the Cycladic islands of the Aegean and dates to the Bronze Age.

Instead of a comprehensive catalogue, the book is divided into classes of material; articles examining a wide selection of highlights give a sense of the range of the collection, featuring inscriptions, sculpture, pottery, bronzes and terracottas from the Greek and Roman worlds. The articles are written by several authors and vary widely in their presentation and tone. Some articles draw on the collection history described in Part 1 to reveal information about the artefacts, while others pass over the significance of the place of acquisition in favour of a general introduction to the class of objects, together with introductory bibliography. Some articles are catalogues of quantities of material, others are discursive essays, and some focus on one antiquity alone. The lack of consistency makes this section difficult to read at times.

The way that the material is divided into chapters is also problematic. As with most collections built up over a long time, primarily through donation from collectors who had different personal aims, this is a collection of variable quality and interest. Inscriptions and coins are particularly well represented, since these were acquired specifically for teaching purposes, but other groups of material are less coherent. The editors have separated the discussion of the collection by classes which sometimes focus on medium, subdivided to a greater or lesser extent – for instance the Archaic and Classical Greek and South Italian pottery has a single chapter (8.2) while Roman and Latian pottery is split into six articles by different specialists (8.3.1–6). At other times the divisions focus on functional class instead, as is the case with votive figurines and votive pottery vessels, and this creates a rather inconsistent structure to the book. These methods of dividing the presentation of the collection also obscure some interesting connections between material from a single collector, and even a single archaeological context. While it is often noted that much of the collection lacks archaeological provenance (pp. 1, 13, 115–16), there are some artefacts from known contexts which could have been better highlighted. One example is the material Ashby collected at Ponte di Nona, listed in Chapter 6.4 (‘Etruscan Anatomical Votive Terracottas’: pp. 208, 213) and mentioned again in Chapter 8.3.1 (‘Italic Votive Vessels’: p. 285), but with inadequate cross-referencing, using only inventory numbers. A different illustration of the way that information has been separated is the discussion of the timbers from the first-century ships sunk in lake Nemi, which is included as appendix 3.3 to Geffcken's article in Part 1. Following the destruction of the Nemi Ship Museum during World War II, the AAR examples are some of the only timber still surviving and seem to merit a place in Part 2 as another set of important artefacts which have some sort of archaeological provenance.

This book is both a fascinating account of the history of collecting and a rich source of artefact information, providing the reader is prepared to dig down deep, but issues of organisation have resulted in a volume which is not quite as great as the sum of its parts.