Gordion, occupied between the Early Bronze and the Middle Ages (c. 2500 BC–AD 1500), is among the most important settlements in central Anatolia (Turkey). During its long history, it rose to the status of regional centre and shrank to the size of a modest hamlet, reaching its apogee between the ninth and early seventh centuries BC as the capital of the Phrygian kingdom. As an archaeological site, Gordion started to be investigated in 1950, and the project surrounding it gradually developed into a multifaceted scientific programme standing today at the forefront of archaeological research in Turkey.

This book, part of the site's final monographs series, perfectly showcases the project's interdisciplinarity by integrating the analyses of bioarchaeological datasets with a range of other studies carried out at the site itself and in the surrounding region. It has two main goals: the first is to provide a synthesis of 25 years of palaeobotanical research conducted by John Marston and his predecessor Naomi Miller. The second is to integrate Gordion's landscape context with these datasets to showcase a novel theoretical and methodological approach to the reconstruction of human decision-making on subsistence strategies, and more broadly to trace the changing patterns of the local environment through time.

The volume is very successful in achieving both goals. At merely 140 pages of text, it is a complex, layered work, dense but understandable to the non-specialist, clearly structured and illustrated by plentiful photographs, plans and charts. The analytical section builds around a large and well-documented palaeobotanical dataset—entirely available online—and its structure is supported by a range of already published works that in part alleviate the need for detailed data presentation. One of the most significant aspects is Marston's command of the archaeological and historical evidence from Gordion itself, and more broadly from central Anatolia, and his ability to weave it in to the discussion of the results and the wider interpretive framework. In particular, contextual analysis clearly emerges as a powerful tool to highlight patterns of consumption and deposition of faunal and floral remains, and therefore to build additional layers of interpretive complexity. The investigation also effortlessly moves between analytical windows of differing spatial scales, allowing the intra-site data to be contextualised within their surrounding environments, within central Anatolia and ultimately within Near Eastern-wide trends. It does so through archaeozoological, ethnographic, ethnobotanical and geoarchaeological research conducted within the framework of the Gordion archaeological project, as well as the careful reassessment of all known palaeo-environmental and palaeoclimatic proxies across Anatolia.

What emerges is a nuanced and in-depth picture of human-environment interactions across 3000 years of Gordion's history (the Early and Middle Bronze Ages were not included in the study for lack of systematically excavated contexts). The volume starts with a synthetic overview of the exploitation of the surrounding floral and faunal resources for food consumption, medicinal and cosmetic production, and textile manufacture. Marston then goes on to assess agricultural and pastoral practices at the site, providing solid evidence for irrigation, crop diversification, horticulture, vertical transhumance, specialised animal husbandry and a focus on sheep/goat rearing. By reconstructing patterns of wood management, exploitation and consumption, he further outlines wood-foraging strategies for building construction, fuel supply and manufacturing processes. Casting his net wider, the author employs the palaeobotanical analysis to sketch resource-procurement networks at the local and regional scales (wood, nuts, olive oil and wine among others), and how such products would have been preferentially consumed in different socio-economic contexts.

In the last and perhaps most enjoyable section, the author combines together the different strands of evidence to provide a perspective on the mid- and long-term environmental trends in the region surrounding Gordion, building a case for the significant impact of human agency on the landscape well before the Industrial Era. Through the assessment of multiple variables, Marston paints a picture of increasing landscape degradation, witnessed by diminishing wood and wild game availability, the intensification of agricultural activities, increasing topsoil erosion and steppe overgrazing, as well as a general reduction in biodiversity. In particular, he identifies two phases when these trends rapidly intensified and provoked long-term alterations to the local environments. The first is the Middle Phrygian period, a time when Gordion was a capital and its population rapidly expanded. For this phase, Marston brings in convincing evidence for agricultural intensification (irrigation), as well as higher proportions of cattle rearing and the relocation of sheep/goat herds away from the site, possibly at specialised upland sites. The second is the Roman period, when centralised economic policies imposed the cultivation of specific crops across large areas of the empire; at Gordion, this is evidenced by an over-reliance on a single species (the easily taxable bread wheat) at the expense of the crop diversification and risk-buffering typical of earlier phases. These episodes in particular are employed by the author to set up a cautionary tale about the unsustainability of agricultural, pastoral and foraging practices that breach the threshold of the local environment's capacity to regenerate.

In Marston's opinion, the identified changes in the local environment are essentially driven by human activities, perhaps to a fault. While the evidence brought forward for landscape degradation is clear and grounded, one should not discount the possibility of a climatic contribution, given the well-known and Near East-wide trend towards higher aridity across the Late Holocene. It is an important point and all the more relevant because the author makes a clear reference to the modern phenomenon of global warming, itself the probable result of natural causes in combination with human agency.

This minor quibble notwithstanding, the book is both stimulating and fascinating in its ability to employ archaeological data as a tool to understand the present better, and is suggested as a compulsory read not only for Anatolian archaeologists, but for all students and researchers interested in environmental archaeology.