Thessaloniki, as Hellenistic polis, Tetrarchic capital and second city of the medieval Byzantine Empire, offers a continuous urban history and archaeological palimpsest rare in the Roman East outside of Constantinople itself. In this significant new publication, Anastassios Antonaras collects the evidence for artisanal and manufacturing activities taking place within the city from its foundation in 316/15 BC until its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in AD 1430. The book has its origins in a paper delivered by Antonaras at a 2010 symposium in Mainz, Hinter den Mauern und auf dem offenen Land: Neue Forschungen zum Leben im Byzantinischen Reich. The event sought to emphasise less sumptuous aspects of Byzantine material culture and to explore the social relations between agricultural and artisanal producers. Antonaras’ book therefore presents a multifaceted view of craftsmen in both their spatial and social milieux through an exhaustive examination of all available archaeological, literary and epigraphic sources. His definition of his subject is broad, ranging from installations for the production of lime mortar to the workshops of mosaicists and guilds of hat-makers. Such an approach allows the archaeology to speak for a complex network of labourers and artisans across the city and across almost two millennia.

Antonaras, currently based at Thessaloniki's Museum for Byzantine Culture, is well placed to undertake such a task. His experience of the city's archaeology covers more than twenty years and includes both participation in rescue excavations and the curation of major exhibitions. The material presented here represents extensive archival research, close examination of museum collections, and interviews with Antonaras’ colleagues. Archaeological evidence is complemented by an omnivorous approach to the literary and epigraphic. Antonaras references histories, hagiographies, Athonite acts, legal sources, inscriptions and sigillography, illuminating artisanal activities that are not visible in the archaeological record and offering new perspectives on those that are.

The resulting book is structured according to three chronological chapters followed by a catalogue of 112 archaeologically attested workshops. The first chapter is a survey of the Hellenistic through to Late Antique periods, with the subsequent two focusing on those of the Middle and Late Byzantine periods. Each opens with a historical overview briefly describing political events and their demographic repercussions. Manufacturing processes are then discussed, beginning with those that employed fire before moving to those that required large quantities of water and concluding with activities leaving little trace in the archaeological record. Catalogue entries offer a brief description of a site accompanied by plans, excavation photographs and photographs of small finds indicative of artisanal production. Short bibliographies are provided at the end of each entry, and each workshop is given a grid reference relating to a series of maps at the end of the book. Footnotes are thorough and detailed throughout the text, and accompanying colour photographs are of exceptionally high quality. The maps provide a useful visual aid, though it may have been preferable to plot sites by period rather than only workshop type.

The main strength of Antonaras’ approach is in its elucidation of the social and spatial dynamics of production. In some cases this involves a better understanding of the production of the building materials still visible in the medieval churches of the city. A series of middle Byzantine kilns for the production of brick tiles of the type familiar from such monuments as the Panagia Chalkeon were excavated in both the western and eastern necropoleis.Footnote ¹ A contemporary glass workshop is attested northeast of Hagia Sofia by small finds from a rescue excavation. It manufactured both circular laminated cakes to be cut into mosaic tesserae and decorated tiles for the inlay of marble sculpture.Footnote ² The socioeconomic stratification of Thessalonian artisans is also evident. A Palaiologan period tannery consisting of two limed reservoirs was uncovered on Zephyron Street, close to the Twelve Apostles.Footnote ³ The leather produced in such workshops was presumably employed by more affluent artisans, such as the saddler Nikolaos Kamoudes, attested in a legal document of AD 1264. Kamoudes was a tenant of the Iveron, living with his family in one of the monastery's urban dependencies.Footnote ⁴ His tenancy contract states that he is to be responsible for the maintenance of the chapel and associated structures, which must have brought the saddler into contract with construction workers and other artisans working in architectural media.

Arts, Crafts and Trades in Ancient and Byzantine Thessaloniki provides access to an invaluable corpus of archaeological material and wide-ranging evidence for its social interpretation. Anastassios Antonaras’ exhaustive approach to archaeo-historical evidence opens the space for an exploration of the social dynamics of local production, and illuminates the various chaînes opératoires at work in ancient and medieval Thessaloniki. A significant contribution to the study of Thessaloniki, and to Byzantine urbanism more generally.