This publication comprises the site gazetteer and maps produced following a period of archaeological survey work carried out in the region of ancient Thugga by the Institut National du Patrimoine de la Tunisie and the University of Trento, under the direction of Mustapha Khanoussi and Mariette de Vos Raaijmakers. A main phase of fieldwork took place between 1994 and 2000, with further site visits in 2008 and 2012,Footnote ¹ covering a total area of approximately 371 km² and with a combination of intensive and extensive methods (De Vos Reference De Vos2000, 9; Reference De Vos, Bowman and Wilson2013, 143).

The urban centre of Thugga, a UNESCO world heritage site, probably became the royal seat of the Numidian king Micipsa after the death of his father, the Roman ally Massinissa, a couple of years prior to the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. The town lay just west of the fossa regia, or royal ditch, which separated the former Carthaginian territory that had come into Rome's possession from the Numidian kingdom. It appears to have been in this region that Marius settled many of his Gaetulian veterans during the 90s BC, from which time a complicated pattern of Roman landholding developed in the area. It is likely that some of the largest senatorial estates existed here, outside of the original provincial boundary, until Nero confiscated the estates and, as is known to us through a series of important agrarian inscriptions found in the area towards the end of the nineteenth century, the estates came under the management of the imperial fisc. The archaeological character of this landscape is, therefore, of major interest.

The publication of the site catalogue has been split into two parts: Tome 2 is dedicated solely to the publication of the many locations where extant architectural remains of the Thugga aqueduct were recorded, whereas Tome 1, the volume under review here, covers the other 641 sites of various types discovered, or previously known and revisited, during the rural survey. The sections which make up the vast majority of the publication are the gazetteer of sites (19–186), and the reconstructed plans (219–413). A little over 240 of the 641 sites recorded in the gazetteer were deemed interesting enough to be subject to detailed survey and have plans of their more notable remains included. For a full appreciation of the plans and the gazetteer, reference to the fifty or so abbreviations used for the stone and other elements recorded on the sites is necessary (listed on page 20). The abbreviation ‘C’, for example, is used to indicate the presence of a press counterweight block (contrepoids), ‘B’ for a press anchorstone (bloc d'ancrage), ‘Ep’ for an inscription (épigraphe), and so on. These abbreviations take some time to get used to, but after a little while comparing the information given about each site in the gazetteer with the plans available at the back, the level of attention to detail becomes really quite charming. Many of the plans include the reconstructed floor plans of buildings. Some of these require something of the eye of faith, but on most it is a simple task of separating the recorded reality from the dashed lines of tentatively suggested wall alignments.

There is not enough space here to summarize the fascinating results of this important survey work, and it should be made clear that the reader interested in more synthetic information should look elsewhere than the volume under review, which offers no more than the site gazetteer with Lambert coordinates and short descriptions of each site, a table including the suggested periods of occupation, and a series of site plans. An accompanying CD-ROM contains additional low resolution photographs of many of the sites. For an in depth discussion of the results of the survey one must look elsewhere. A substantial preliminary report of the 1994–2000 fieldwork, complete with synthesis and interpretation, appeared more than a decade ago (De Vos Reference De Vos2000), and the short preface (5–6) directs the reader to the considerable body of interpretative literature which has appeared in the interim period, and most, but not all, of these references can be found in the bibliography (197–203).Footnote ²

With regard to chronology, the opening sections of the volume make clear that every effort has been made to solve some of the initial problems concerning the handling of the less datable ceramic types, particularly the North African handmade wares, for which the preliminary report drew some criticism (Wilson Reference Wilson and de Vos2001, 187). A four-page note on the dating of the sites, written by Martina Andreoli, is included, and an explanation of the types of evidence used in establishing each chronological bracket – Prehistoric, Libyan/Punic, Late Republican, and so on – is given (9–12). Andreoli acknowledges that, while there exist continuing problems in the dating of the handmade wares, the publication of Michel Bonifay's seminal work on African ceramics has contributed to some progress being made, particularly with the identification of the calcitic wares of the fifth–seventh centuries AD. Some similarities in form and fabric between the survey assemblages and ceramic sherds dated from recent excavations have allowed for a significant refinement in the dating brackets of many of the sites.Footnote ³ A useful three-tier, colour-coded system for indicating dating confidence is also now used in the table to distinguish between site phases with an abundance of ceramic evidence, those where there is a degree of uncertainty in the dating of the ceramics, or simply too few ceramics to assert certainty, and those where the date has been inferred from inscriptions or extant datable structures only.

Each site description in the gazetteer has both a chronological table and a table of the significant architectural elements, which make use of the three-tiered dating confidence system and the list of abbreviations already mentioned. This improves the speed with which one interested in a specific period or architectural element can find the relevant sites. It is regrettable, however, that the specific information about the precise ceramic forms from each site, or the dimensions and typology of architectural elements, is not given anywhere in the publication. With regard to the latter, there is more offered in the preliminary publication than here. For more detail on the ceramics it is necessary to refer to Silvia Polla's unpublished doctoral thesis (Polla Reference Polla2006), which the reviewer is told is now in the very final stages of preparation for publication. One also learns from the introductory remarks that the olive and wine press elements are to be the subject of an in-depth study undertaken by Lanfranchi, Attoui and de Vos Raaijmakers, but it is not clear when or in what form this will appear. On a brighter note, a really commendable effort has been made to include in the gazetteer not just the inscriptions found on the survey, but also those previously known with their concordances, dating, and full Latin text. This now makes it possible to learn something of the broader archaeological nature of sites where previously only the text of inscriptions had been recorded. A list of unique names and cognomina found on these inscriptions are listed in alphabetical order towards the end of the volume (189–195), complete with their relevant site number for reference.