A monumental inscription of emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518 CE), now to be found in the town of Mecitözü, located on the Çorum-Amasya highway in Çorum province in north central Turkey, is a key piece of evidence for the location of the Byzantine city of Euchaïta (188–89, 221–22). In late Roman times, Euchaïta was situated in the province of Helenopontus, a mountainous, upland region of Anatolia that extended along the south shores of the Black Sea. According to local reports collected in 1963 by the late Cyril Mango and Ihor Ševčenko, the Anastasius inscription had been brought to Mecitözü from the nearby village of Avkat (also spelled Avhat, and now renamed Beyözü), only some 6.7 km away to the north.Footnote ¹ On the basis of this inscription, and another now at the city of Amasya (ancient Amaseia, located some 62 km by modern road from Beyözü), Mango and Ševčenko identified Avkat as Euchaïta, an argument first made by the Belgian Byzantinist H. Grégoire in 1910.Footnote ²

As this epigraphic evidence makes clear, when Anastasius granted Euchaïta civic status (probably 515–18 CE), the settlement was endowed with a bishopric and city walls in recognition of the importance of its cult of the Christian martyr Theodore Tiro (Τήρων) “the Recruit,” whose original feast day fell on 17 February. Theodore was a soldier-saint said to have been martyred during the Diocletianic persecutions at Amaseia, and his relics were then translated to Euchaïta (221–22).Footnote ³ Popular devotion to the saint flourished in Byzantine Anatolia between the 6th and 11th c., when pilgrims came to venerate his tomb in his eponymous church at Euchaïta.Footnote ⁴ The most important sources for this cult are four martyrdom accounts and two collections of miracula or miracle stories, the first set dated to the early 6th and the early 7th c., and the second to ca. 670–90, when Euchaïta, as a stronghold of the military commandery and later thema of Armeniakon, was the target of repeated Arab attacks.Footnote ⁵

The importance of these miracula as sources for daily life and urban society at Euchaïta (and in Byzantine Anatolia in general) during the 6th and 7th c. has long been recognized. On the basis of these miracula, in an article published in 1985, the late F. Trombley argued that Euchaïta was an exception to the then prevailing view of universal urban decline during the 7th and 8th c.Footnote ⁶ Trombley's argument was vigorously challenged by A. Kazhdan, who disagreed with claims that the miracula could be interpreted as evidence for “the flourishing city of Euchaïta.”Footnote ⁷ In the 1980s, very little was known of the archaeology of Anatolian cities during the so-called Byzantine Dark Age of the 7th–9th c., and so these articles stimulated renewed interest in Euchaïta as a potentially important site. Indeed, when a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham in the early 1990s, I recall the late A. A. M. Bryer, then professor of Byzantine studies, asserting that Avkat/Beyözü was a more promising site than that of Amorium (the modern Turkish Hisar or Hisarköy), the former headquarters of the Byzantine commandery and thema of Anatolikon.

This interest at Birmingham in Euchaïta has some relevance, since it was John Haldon (H.), then also teaching at the University of Birmingham, and from 2005 to 2018 at Princeton, who in 2006 initiated the Avkat Archaeological Project (henceforth the AAP).Footnote ⁸ Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia is the final report on the AAP, which was directed by H. for three summer field seasons from 2006 to 2009. H. is arguably the foremost scholar of Byzantium between the 7th and 11th c., so his creation of the AAP, and this book, can be viewed as arising from his seminal publications on Byzantium in the 7th c. and the Iconoclastic era, and his long-standing research on the Byzantine army, logistics, and historical geography.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, H.'s more recent collaborations on environmental history and land use in Byzantine Anatolia constitute a newer line of inquiry that arose in part from the AAP.Footnote ¹⁰ Prior to this book's publication, a number of AAP workshops were held, and preliminary reports and articles on the project have appeared in print and are hosted on the project's web page.Footnote ¹¹ A book chapter published in 2017 provides an overview of the results of the AAP; it can be read as a synopsis of the book under review and contains useful maps and annotated satellite photographs to orient the reader.Footnote ¹² The reader will also find it useful to read the book under review alongside H.'s translation and commentary of the Passio and Miracula of St. Theodore published in 2016.Footnote ¹³

Archaeology and Urban Settlement makes a strong case for the identification of Avkat/Beyözü as Euchaïta and proceeds on that basis. This reviewer sees no good reason to doubt this identification and finds the arguments advanced in this book based upon topographic, toponymic, archaeological, and historical evidence, particularly the interpretation of the topography of Euchaïta in the Miracula of St. Theodore, to be compelling and best fitting the physical situation of modern-day Avkat/Beyözü (202–9). None of the inscriptions published in the volume name Euchaïta, but the reviewer sees little reason to dismiss the oral tradition recorded by Mango and Ševčenko for Avkat/Beyözü being the original findspot of the Anastasian inscription now at Mecitözü. In 1903, J. G. C. Anderson proposed Evlançelebi, a village located some 15.6 km by modern roads from Avkat/Beyözü, as the site of Euchaïta based upon the spolia built into its mosque, but he was later convinced of the case for Avkat made by Henri Grégoire, who convincingly argued for the derivation of its Ottoman name from that of its Byzantine predecessor.Footnote ¹⁴ I therefore find little reason to subscribe to the theory of E. Keskin, who, on the basis of stone finds, proposed in 2015 that Çorum was Euchaïta, and that the village of Abdalata was the site of the church of St. Theodore.Footnote ¹⁵

As the first part of its title implies, the book under review aims to be far more expansive in its scope and ambition than a traditional archaeological survey publication. As the Introduction explains, the project set out to record archaeological remains of all eras, in keeping with the rules of survey permits in Turkey, but with an express focus upon Euchaïta and its region in the Late Roman and Byzantine eras, exploiting its relatively rich historical documentation.Footnote ¹⁶ Key research questions centered on the urban, social, and economic development of Euchaïta and its region from Roman through Ottoman times, considering the impact of Anastasius's elevation of the city to civic and episcopal status, the role of the cult of St. Theodore, and, in particular, the questions raised by Trombley and Kazhdan concerning urban development through the Byzantine era, especially the so-called Dark Ages of the 7th to 9th c. The AAP was a collaborative, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary project, and this is reflected in the long experience of survey and excavation in Turkey of leading team members Hugh Elton (E.) and James Newhard (N.), the coeditors of this volume with H. This is also evident from the credentials of other team members who are contributors.

One of the strengths of this book is that Euchaïta and its region are not viewed in isolation, although apparently the efficacy of this approach was not self-evident at the start of the project. As E. writes in Chapter 1: “Our initial plans of integrating a building-based approach to the village of Beyözü with a regional framework gradually became subsumed within a larger regional canvas, although remaining focused on Beyözü” (9). This prompted larger research questions: was Euchaïta “a typical small provincial town in north-central Anatolia?” (221); and how did Euchaïta fit into a settlement hierarchy better known from larger and more important administrative and military centers like Amorium, Nicaea, or Ankara, or small rural settlements like Çadır Höyük? By asking such questions, this volume seeks to problematize and integrate the findings of the AAP into the bigger methodological, historical, and archaeological questions of urbanism and historical geography in Byzantine Anatolia, something that few survey publications have attempted before.

One aspect of the book that readers may find a little jarring is its periodization. Despite a growing dissatisfaction with the term “Byzantine Dark Ages,” there is little consensus on what to call the period of the 7th–9th c. in Byzantium. To establish a more neutral terminology, new terms such as “Transitional Period” and “Byzantine Early medieval” have been proposed.Footnote ¹⁷ This book adopts the conventional term “Late Roman,” used in British archaeology for the period from the reign of Diocletian to that of Heraclius, but it then applies the term “Early Byzantine” to the following two and a half centuries. As in some countries “Early Byzantine” is used interchangeably for “Late Roman” and “Late Antique,” this reshuffling of the periods may mislead some readers used to more conventional applications.

In addition to the established methods of historical geography, combining historical and topographical sources with archaeological evidence, and the application of remote sensing techniques, the AAP gave greater prominence to environmental and climatic data, a decision reflecting the development of a more inclusive archaeology of landscape over the past 20 years. Another key goal of the AAP was to take advantage of cutting-edge field survey techniques, seeking full integration into the project design of the newer technologies of GIS, Lidar scanning reconnaissance, and satellite photography. Thus, this publication can lay claim to providing new models for the archaeological-historical investigation of Byzantine Anatolia. As the editors explain in the Introduction:

The book comprises an introduction and eight chapters, followed by “Some concluding remarks” and four appendixes. In keeping with the project design of the AAP, the book's chapters orient and gradually intensify the reader's gaze on the site and region by building up a multi-dimensional, layered picture of Euchaïta in its Anatolian context. In contrast to traditional survey publications, which present gazetteers of sites surveyed and find catalogs, only two chapters and two appendixes discuss such materials (Chapter 6 on ceramics and Chapter 7 on the archaeology of the city and its hinterland; Appendix 2 on coins and Appendix 4 on epigraphy, with catalogs). Instead, all the raw survey data, including inventoried finds and the photographic archive can be found on the digital archive platform Open Context, which I discuss in more detail below (xxi, 7).Footnote ¹⁸ The remaining chapters (1–5, 8) take a more expansive view, seeking to contextualize the history, archaeology, and environment of Euchaïta and its region by placing it in a much broader historiographical and geographical frame. The “bookends” of the volume are Chapters 1 and 8. Chapter 1, by E., lays out the research questions of the AAP, and sets the scene by placing Euchaïta in the context of the geography, history, and archaeology of Pontus from the Bronze Age up to the 6th c. CE. Chapter 8, by H., serves as a concluding chapter, pulling together and building on the conclusions of the other chapters to create an integrated urban-historical narrative for the site from the 4th c. CE through the Ottoman period. Overall, the book argues for the identification of Avkat/Beyözü with Euchaïta, and for continuity of settlement from Roman through Ottoman times, with an increase in intensity of land use in Late Antiquity followed by a relative decline in the 7th and 8th c. (59–69, and table 3.1).

Readers unfamiliar with the specialized technical language and theoretical perspectives employed in Chapters 2 and 3 may find them hard going, but these chapters can be read as comprehensive overviews of the most recent approaches and methods in their respective fields. Chapter 2, by Eastwood and Yiğitbaşıoğlu, can be read as a stand-alone synthesis of all the geological, environmental, and climate evidence known to date from Turkey and the Çankiri-Çorum region. Some readers may ask what the formation processes of geological eras up to 100 million years ago have to do with a survey of a Byzantine site, but the goal here is to provide the broadest possible contextualization and to relate it to the entire sweep of human occupation in the region since prehistory. Given that environmental and climatic data such as pollen from lake cores, speleothems from caves, and dendrochronology can only be understood in a Braudelian-style longue durée, this approach is not surprising, especially since the authors are probably the foremost scientists working in this field in Turkey.

Similarly, N.'s Chapter 3 (along with Appendix 3) not only sets out the specific questions and project design but can also be read as an up-to-date introduction to the theoretical, practical, and technical methodologies of such surveys in general. The AAP was restricted by permit to “the immediate hinterlands of Avkat, of approximately 20 km²,” with intensive field survey concentrated in and around the two villages of Avkat/Beyözü and Elmapınar, covering an area of about 9.11 km² (49). A “super-intensive” survey method first developed by A. Poulter at Nicopolis ad Istrum in Bulgaria was applied where the density of surface finds indicated an “Area of Interest” or AOI (50–51), such as in the field thought to be the site of a church, possibly that of St. Theodore (190–94 and fig. 7.1), and sites thought to be a series of Byzantine watch towers (65). There are some potential issues with the methodologies. N. speaks of the importance of measuring “artefact density” according to period (58), but this is constrained by difficulties of dating, localizing, or even recognizing the vast majority of local wares of the Byzantine era in the Pontus, as Vroom, in Chapter 6, freely admits (136). Unfortunately, hoped-for trial excavation trenches at Avkat/Beyözü that could have provided a stratified pottery series for the region did not materialize, so as with many surveys in Turkey, a more detailed pottery and site chronology of the Byzantine era was not possible.

Chapter 4 by Craft addresses “the archaeology of movement” (71) and connectivity by exploring the functions and uses of road systems and routes in the Çorum region and their nodal connections to Euchaïta. Craft applies “least-cost path” (LCP) analysis and GIS landscape modeling to propose primary and secondary routes which could be ground-truthed in the field and by reference to the historical and archaeological sources such as Roman milestones (70–87). On the more local scale, Craft also proposes putative lesser routes of unpaved paths and trackways through the rural landscape of Avkat/Beyözü.

Chapter 5, by Bikoulis, seeks to reconstruct the Byzantine landscape and rural economy around Avkat/Beyözü using historical, palynological, and archaeological sources (100–7). Bikoulis adopts a method designed to produce a “heuristic understanding of socio-natural landscape dynamics” (97), meaning that it seeks to apply modern data of land use, combined with satellite remote sensing and GIS modeling of contemporary vegetation cover, to create a landscape model that can serve as a baseline from which to work back to an approximation of the Byzantine landscape. Bikoulis utilizes 20th-c. data for cereal production, livestock, and census records from the Avkat/Beyözü valley and Çorum province as indirect proxies for potential Byzantine crop yields, stock-rearing, and population maxima. Such approximations must remain hypothetical, even if there are certain constants through time such as general topography, geology and soils, and native flora and fauna, but Bikoulis constructs an interesting theoretical framework for understanding the Byzantine landscape, one that raises questions of how the elevation of Euchaïta to city status, the pilgrimage center of St. Theodore, and the presence of imperial administrators and military personnel after the 7th c. could have affected the regional economy (125–33).

In Chapter 6, on “Ceramics, agricultural resources and food,” Vroom notes that the overwhelming majority of pottery sherds collected at Avkat/Beyözü were unglazed coarse, plain, and cooking wares, probably of local manufacture that are “quite hard to date” without a local stratigraphic excavation as a reference point (134). As she was only able to date the Avkat/Beyözü ceramics to broad periods, Vroom decided that an “unconventional strategy is needed to deal with this survey material in a fruitful way” (136). Vroom opts for a “functional analysis” (136), focusing on the uses of the ceramics for transport, storage, cooking, eating, and drinking, and thus seeks to explore the “socio-cultural perspective” of the survey material for daily life, agriculture, economy, and diet (136). Vroom concludes that the pottery is suggestive of “moist cooking” in stewpots that involved stewing, boiling, and simmering of grains, pulses, and meats (183–84). The cooking wares from Avkat/Beyözü did not suggest grilling, roasting, or frying methods, but this may be a consequence of Vroom's analysis being limited to ceramic material, as this reviewer notes that the Byzantine inhabitants of Euchaïta could have used metal pans, spits, or grills for these cooking methods, as attested from excavations.Footnote ¹⁹ Euchaïta did, however, have some trading connections to the wider Byzantine world, as Vroom identifies amphoriskoi of the 6th–7th c. from the region of Ephesos containing a spiced wine called konditon (κόνδιτον), and fragments of Günsenin type 1 wine amphoras manufactured at Ganos in the Sea of Marmara and dating to the 10th–11th c. (143–47).

Chapter 7, by E., represents the core of the volume, presenting a discussion of the archaeology of Euchaïta and its hinterland based on a synthesis of all evidence, to give some idea of the appearance and functions of the town. Building remains on the surface were recorded by survey and mapped below ground by satellite imaging, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and magnetometry (see also Appendix 1, 257–68).Footnote ²⁰ E. also uses the disiecta membra of buildings in the forms of stone spolia and surface finds such as roof tiles and wall bricks to discuss building materials, construction, and the general appearance of structures. E. reconstructs the Anastasian circuit as a simple defensive wall running between two hills that walled off the southern flank of the city. The Anastasian inscription is thought to have surmounted the main gate leading into the city from the south (187–89, 93). Outside and south of this fortification, and probably flanking the main road into the city, surface remains and geophysical survey suggested the site of the pilgrimage complex and church of St. Theodore and an associated Christian cemetery (189–95). The foundation of the fortress on the acropolis of Kale Tepe is linked to events in the miracula and the creation of inner citadels in other Byzantine cities in the 7th c. (197–99).

The final Chapter 8, by H., pulls together the conclusions of the other chapters and builds on them, providing a history of Byzantine Euchaïta contextualized within the broader history of Byzantine Anatolia. H. discusses the cult of St. Theodore as the likely catalyst for demographic growth that led to the establishment of Euchaïta as a polis by the emperor Anastasius I. Thanks to the new evidence presented in this book, Euchaïta can now be compared with other “new cities,” large and small, like Dara, Amorium, Theodosioupolis (Erzurum), and Resafa-Sergioupolis in Syria, incorporated or rebuilt by emperors in Late Antiquity.Footnote ²¹ H. concludes that the pilgrimage complex of St. Theodore had “a church with at least some pretensions,” and surmises the existence of related philanthropic institutions and monasteries (212–21). One hopes that survey and excavation may yet reveal the buildings of this complex, which could be usefully compared with other pilgrimage complexes in Asia Minor, such as that of Alahan in Isauria, the Archangel Michael at Germia in Galatia, and St. Thekla at Meriamlik in Cilicia.

H. describes medieval Euchaïta in “a middling range of settlement, possessing some defensive value and functioning as a local and possibly supra-local market” (222), and classifies it as “a small semi-rural/semi-urban centre with both urban and military/defensive characteristics” (246). In the mid-7th c., Euchaïta became part of a defensive system of fortified centers intended to combat the Arab invasions of Anatolia.Footnote ²² H. suggests that these developments led to a state-led restructuring of the local agrarian economy and the city's urban layout to meet the needs of imperial troops and administrators. These developments at Euchaïta have also been posited at Amorium, the command center of Anatolikon, prompting the hypothesis that they can be attributed to coordinated, imperial policies directed centrally from Constantinople.Footnote ²³ The military role of Euchaïta declined in the 10th–11th c., but its prominence as a place of pilgrimage and exile continued. A final section traces the history of Euchaïta, and its successor Avkat/Beyözü, from the Seljuk conquests of the 1070s through the Ottoman period and into the early Republican era. “Some concluding remarks” follow, which offer final reflections on the goals of the AAP and possible future directions (255–56).

In the interests of economy and public access, the editors decided to store the AAP survey data online in the non-profit digital archive platform Open Context. From the point of view of publication costs, this decision is understandable and part of a growing trend; one only hopes that changing software and servers will not jeopardize access in the future. In a desire to minimize the price of the book, illustrations were kept to a minimum and are reproduced entirely in black-and-white. Only certain figures, maps, and tables appear in the book, although the text refers to other figures which do not and are stored in the AAP Open Context archive with URLs cited in the book's footnotes. In my opinion, this is a drawback of the volume. Finding these illustrations on the Open Context site using their URL codes is challenging, especially as most of them can run to over 30 characters in length. Instead, I advise the reader to access the Open Context page containing a complete set of these illustrations as downloadable PDFs.Footnote ²⁴ Including this handy link in the list of figures, maps, and tables (vii–ix) would have helped readers.

Although the editors hoped to “attract a broader historical and general readership” (7) by making the AAP data openly accessible, a visit to the AAP Open Context web pages can be disorienting, even for an archaeologist. The landing page lacks an explanation in layman's terms of what most visitors would like to know at the outset: the organization of the pages, how to navigate them, and how to find things. These can be discovered only by clicking on active features, and despite this being supposedly intuitive, it took several visits to work this out by trial and error. As far as this (re)viewer could tell, the AAP online archive contains a daunting 45,421 records, of which some 6,325 were “media” records of finds. Clicking on the “data records” tab reveals categories of data records, but more helpful is visiting the specific URL that provides a database of finds accompanied by digital photographs and brief descriptions.Footnote ²⁵ Unfortunately, there is no list of search-terms used in this database. For example, the terms “column,” “capital,” “post,” and “press” yielded search results, but “palmette capital,” “templon baluster,” and “screw press weight” did not. Finds of all kinds (including walls, ceramics, and pithoi) were given F[ind]-numbers without distinction, and the database enumerates records, not individual finds, with most finds having multiple photographic records. Consequently, I found it nearly impossible to work out exactly how many stone finds were inventoried. The identifications and descriptions of these finds in the database very much reflect raw field data that has not been edited or standardized, and so the quality and accuracy of these entries vary greatly.

Carved stones and inscriptions from the Avkat/Beyözü region have been the subject of publication since the 19th c., most notably by J. G. C. Anderson, F. and E. Cumont, and H. Grégoire.Footnote ²⁶ Prior to the AAP, the most recent surveys were conducted in the 1990s by C. Marek and M. Adak, and between 2007 and 2010 by E. Keskin.Footnote ²⁷ These surveys were published independently, and so their catalogs can be read as supplementary to, and overlapping with, the stone and epigraphic finds referenced in this book's AAP Open Context database.

“Appendix 4: Epigraphy,” by Nowakowski and Trombley, lists 18 inscriptions, of which six were originally published by Marek and Adak (283–318). All but one (312–14, no. 16, a Latin milestone) are Christian funerary inscriptions. Of particular interest in these epitaphs are professions and ecclesiastical ranks, the latter perhaps in connection with the pilgrimage complex of St. Theodore (285–86). One is the tombstone of an abbess (304–6, no. 11), presumably of a local monastery or related philanthropic institution.Footnote ²⁸ Monastic burial is not well documented in early Byzantine Anatolia, so this is a useful addition.Footnote ²⁹ Although the inscriptions are discussed extensively in Appendix 4, frustratingly, no dates are proposed for any of them; the majority are most likely of the 6th or early 7th c. to judge from the formulae and onomastics. Nor is this appendix a comprehensive corpus of all inscriptions from the survey region gathered from other publications. Given the scattered state of these epigraphic publications, such a comprehensive undertaking would have benefited the reader and provided additional context to the Avkat/Beyözü finds. Fortunately, this is offset somewhat by the synthesis published by Marek and Adak cited in the book.Footnote ³⁰

As one commonly finds in rural Anatolia, at Avkat/Beyözü the finest spolia were from local mosques, of which the most impressive are those at the nearby 14th-c. dervish complex of Elvançelebi (202–3).Footnote ³¹ Others were discovered in Avkat/Beyözü itself or in the surrounding fields and village cemetery. More utilitarian stones such as basins, mortars, and screw press weights are discussed as evidence of agricultural economy in Chapter 5. Architectural elements and fragments of liturgical furniture are presented as evidence of the built environment and the presence of churches in Chapter 7 (187–89, 192–96), although E. does not discuss all the pieces recorded (such as the early Byzantine templon post F1329 found in the village cemetery). The book does not contain a separate catalog listing the most important carved stone finds. This is a pity, as there is no detailed discussion of the significance, dating, and comparanda for these stone finds, although E. does cite a wider literature and discusses a local type of palmette column capital (193).

The epigraphic and carved stone finds appear to be relatively small in number; to provide some context, though, this surely reflects the relative importance and size of Euchaïta as “a typical small provincial town in north-central Anatolia” (221). Surveys of Anatolian Byzantine sites (and here I exclude some exceptional and unique concentrations identified in select sites and regions) routinely record far smaller numbers of inscriptions dating to the period between 300 and 600, a trend that reflects the overall decline of the “epigraphic habit” in Asia Minor in Late Antiquity.Footnote ³² This can be evidenced by comparison of the epigraphic finds from Avkat/Beyözü with those from the survey of the pilgrimage center of the Archangel Michael at Germia-Gümüşkonak and its territorium in western Galatia, which was a far more important center of pilgrimage than Euchaïta. During the 2010 survey season at Germia, 12 new inscriptions were found in Germia itself; a further 18 were found in nearby villages during the regional survey, a tally that was augmented in 2011 by at least three more. It should also be noted that the Germia survey discovered ornate monogrammed capitals along with Byzantine spolia that seem to have been more elaborate and numerous than those at Euchaïta.Footnote ³³ The relative importance of the two sites therefore appears to be reflected in the number and quality of the stone finds, and so in this context, it is not unexpected that Avkat/Beyözü produced less spectacular finds of cut stone than Germia.

The same argument can be made for the coin finds from Avkat/Beyözü, which are listed chronologically in Appendix 2, by Stahl (269–73). There are 25 specimens, all identifiable as copper denominations from the 5th–11th c. Three late Roman coins of the 5th c. predate the reign of Anastasius I, and seven cover the period 498–648. The largest group of coins (15) are 10th- and 11th-c. Stahl observes that these chronological clusters, small though they are, repeat those of coins found through excavations at Amorium and Kalenderhane in Istanbul (269 and fig. A2.1). Perhaps more interesting here (and unremarked upon in Appendix 2) is the gap in the Avkat/Beyözü coin series between 649 and 975, especially since at Amorium and Kalenderhane there is continuity in the incidence of coins through these centuries.Footnote ³⁴ Is this gap at Avkat/Beyözü due to the vagaries of chance finds, or a lack of excavation? Only further investigation will tell.

Some readers of this book may balk at its contextualizing approach and may prefer a traditional field survey report. Indeed, this reviewer would have preferred to see catalogs of the most important ceramic and carved stone finds included in the volume for ease of access (perhaps future publications could address this?). Be that as it may, this would ignore the aims of the AAP and this book's stated intent to reflect a new kind of survey publication (255). Beyond publishing the conclusions of the field survey of “a typical small provincial town” (221), Archaeology and Urban Settlement provides a much-needed datum point for the study of such settlements and puts the larger cities that served as provincial capitals, such as Nicaea, Ankara, and Amorium, into a relative perspective for the first time. In fact, the “typical small provincial town” of which Euchaïta was an example may be far more common in Byzantine Anatolia than is currently appreciated. These “middling range” (222) towns are not well known archaeologically, but it is probably safe to assume that they varied considerably in size, function, and appearance, even if they bore the legal status of “city” in the De thematibus and were the seats of suffragan bishoprics in the episcopal Notitiae.Footnote ³⁵ As H. concludes (256), one hopes that this book will encourage the investigation of smaller Byzantine provincial cities in Turkey: this has already begun at sites in Lycia, such as Aperlae, Kyaneai, and Olympos,Footnote ³⁶ and in upland Anatolia at Viranşehir-Mokissos and Binbirkilise-Karadağ.Footnote ³⁷

The editors of Archaeology and Urban Settlement acknowledge that the AAP did not achieve every desired goal, and therefore some aspects of the book remain provisional and a “desideratum” (1–7, 254–55). But on balance, this reviewer thinks that the book largely achieves its ambitious goals in that it provides a Geertzian “thick description” of Euchaïta-Avkat/Beyözü in its Anatolian context, as promised in the book's title, and makes a significant contribution to the study of the Byzantine regions.Footnote ³⁸ The modern historiography of Byzantium follows the grain of the historical sources and tends to be overwhelmingly Constantinople-centric, looking outwards from the capital towards the provinces, and largely concerned with affairs in the provinces only so far as they relate to those in the capital. Locally generated written sources, such as the Miracula of St. Theodore, are rare for Byzantine Anatolia after the early 7th c. This makes the writing of what can be called provincial or regional histories difficult and conceptually challenging. A foundation for Byzantine provincial studies has been created by the historical geographies of the Tabula Imperii Byzantini (TIB), which takes an empirical, if largely positivistic, approach by assembling source materials, mapping out road systems and settlements, and compiling gazetteers of sites.Footnote ³⁹ The TIB is an invaluable resource, but a new model of Byzantine provincial history – one which seeks to problematize the internal development and character of the regions, in all their diversity and complexity, and their functions within the empire – has yet to be fully realized.Footnote ⁴⁰ This book can be considered an attempt to create such a model, employing what might be described as a “post-Braudelian” approach to regional history: one inspired by, but also expanding upon that first developed by Annales School historian F. Braudel.Footnote ⁴¹ Archaeology and Urban Settlement is the first publication to attempt such a synthesis for a region of Byzantine Anatolia, and it demonstrates how historical and archaeological fieldwork can be integrated into the nascent sub-fields of environmental and landscape archaeology to write new provincial histories of Byzantium (255–56). This reviewer hopes that it will inspire similar projects and publications, and stimulate scholarly debate that fosters a deeper understanding of the regions of Anatolia during the Byzantine age.