Since 1926, the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene (SAIA) has extensively investigated the island of Lemnos. Efforts have focused on the unoccupied site of Hephaistia in the north-east, since Myrina in the south-west is now inaccessible beneath the present-day capital. However, SAIA's excavators have also taken a keen interest in the rural hinterland of these cities, and so we are unusually well-informed about the Lemnian chora throughout antiquity. In 2001, SAIA's then-director E. Greco and E. Papi of the University of Siena inaugurated a new programme of research on Lemnos. This has included a re-evaluation of published and unpublished material from the 1926–1939 excavations, reassessments of the evidence for the island's Athenian cleruchy, a geophysical prospection of Hephaistia and new excavations in Hephaistia itself. These new results have now been published in a timely fashion, and so F.'s book (based on her 2005 Ph.D. thesis) sets out instead to provide a vade mecum to this mass of archaeological evidence and its interpretative difficulties.

While F. has endeavoured to be balanced, the nature of the evidence means that this is primarily a book about the archaeology of Hephaistia (207 pages) rather than Myrina (43 pages) and about 1000–300 b.c. (243 pages) rather than 300 b.c.–a.d. 700 (48 pages). Chapters 1–3 survey explorations of Lemnos pre-1918, the Italian excavations since Alessandro Della Seta's first visit in 1923 and the Ephorate's recent work, much of which remains unpublished. Chapters 4–7 then cover the Archaic to Byzantine periods, with each surveying the period's literary and epigraphic sources and then the archaeology of Hephaistia, Myrina and their territories. E. Farinetti's appendix briefly discusses the island's climate, landscape and productive potential. A book like this is not easy to organise, but F.'s solution probably causes more problems than it solves. She has important things to say about major themes in Lemnian history, such as exploitation of the chora, trading networks, religious life and ethnic identity, but the chronological arrangement she has adopted means that her discussions are split up over multiple chapters, while the lack of a subject index makes finding the key passages laborious.

A major motivation behind the decision of Della Seta (SAIA director 1919–1939) to excavate on Lemnos was to discover the society that had produced the so-called ‘Kaminia Stele’ (pp. 22–3, 25, 67, 192–4). Discovered in 1884 near Kaminia in south-west Lemnos, it dates to the sixth century b.c. and is written in a language related to Etruscan. Della Seta, whose political sympathies lay with Mussolini's then recently elected Fascist government, considered the discovery of this Etruscan society ‘un dovere verso l'archeologia patria’ (Bolletino d'Arte 4 [1924–1925], 83, cf. 77; for his politics, D. Manacorda, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 37 [1989], 481). Consequently, ethnic essentialism has cast a long shadow over studies of Archaic Lemnos, and so it is significant that the recent excavations have been able to produce the archaeological evidence to overturn this view. F. is able to show continuous settlement at Hephaistia from the Late Helladic down to the late Archaic period: while immigrants certainly came to Lemnos between the eleventh and sixth centuries b.c., the shifts we see in the island's material culture better fit a model of integration and accommodation than one of periodic expulsion. Lemnos' position at a nodal point in networks of maritime communication between Greece, Thrace and Anatolia produced a correspondingly diverse culture: not the Etruscan society Della Seta sought, but rather the kind of ‘ethnic soup’ one encounters at other nodal points in the Archaic Mediterranean such as Pithekoussai or Naukratis (pp. 69–96, esp. 79).

When, with Miltiades' conquest c. 500 b.c., one group (the Lemnians) really was expelled and replaced by another (the Athenians), this is abundantly clear in the archaeological record. Hephaistia's necropolis moved to a new location, inhumations took over from cremations and the grave goods became exclusively Attic (pp. 218–21). The trace of the Archaic fortifications remained, but a new grid plan was imposed along a different orientation from Archaic Hephaistia's (pp. 223–4). The cult sites at Hephaistia and the nearby Kabeirion were destroyed: some were never rebuilt, while one, rather poetically, had that quintessential symbol of Greek identity, the city's theatre, built over it (pp. 229–32). Though the old gods remained, the Athenians ‘Atticized’ them, the most conspicuous example being the introduction of torch-lit night-time rituals at the Kabeirion to ‘Eleusisize’ this mystery cult (pp. 242–9). While the question of whether fifth-century Lemnos was an apoikia or klerouchia remains unresolved, the archaeology makes it clear that the Athenians on Lemnos actively sought to transform the island into a piece of Attica across the sea, just as Herodotus tells us (6.136–40).

While F. goes as late as the medieval and early modern periods (e.g. pp. 21–2, 169–73, 341–2, 359–61), in general she confines herself to evidence from antiquity. This is regrettable given that our evidence for late Byzantine and early Ottoman Lemnos is unusually rich: in particular, extensive thirteenth- and fourteenth-century praktika from the Athonite monasteries (accessible via J. Koder, Tabula Imperii Byzantini 10: Aigaion Pelagos (Die nördliche Ägäis) [1998] = TIB 10) and Tapu-Tahrir Defter no. 25 (= TT#25), a remarkable Ottoman cadastral survey from 1490 (discussed and translated in H. Lowry, Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos [2002]). This material is of course very helpful for toponymy, and it casts doubt on some of F.'s more adventurous etymologies, for example that modern Ατσική derives from Ἀττική (pp. 291–2; see TIB 10.133 s.v. Ἀτζυκή), or that Πορτιανός comes from Porto Iuno (p. 359; the village did not exist before the eighteenth century), or that Παλαιό Πραιτόριο must refer to a Roman castrum and that the (much later) alternative spelling Παλιά Πορτόρια attests that the portiorum tax was collected here (pp. 294, 359; see TIB 10.248 and Lexikon zur byzantischen Gräzität 6.1362–3 s.vv. πραίτωρ, τὸ πραιτώριν).

However, this later material can also bear on bigger questions. For example, for late fifteenth-century Lemnos, TT#25 gives us reliable information on: agricultural yields (averaged over three years, cereal production was 870,508 kg); the relative contribution of different industries to the economy (cereals were 14.5% – ahead of wine at 11%, but behind sheep at 23%); which crops were being grown where; and the island's population (c. 2,900 – unusually low). This should provide valuable comparative evidence for the isolated data points we have for cereal production on Lemnos when it was an Athenian cleruchy in the fourth century b.c., notably the Grain-Tax Law (374/3, SEG 48.96) and the First Fruits Decree (329/8, I. Eleusis 177). Another point of interest is that 90% of the toponyms in TT#25 are identifiable today, and 95% of the population in 1490 lived in villages which still exist. If, at least in terms of settlement pattern, today's Lemnos had already been ‘invented’ by the fifteenth century, is this, as F. often assumes, a pattern which went all the way back to antiquity, or an invention of the Middle Ages? This material could also have been exploited to nuance F.'s discussion of terra Lemnia (pp. 169–73; see TIB 10.96, 201–2, 283–4 and Lowry, op. cit., pp. 153–71).

There is clearly much still to be done at Hephaistia and, in particular, out in the chora, where the possibilities of environmental history have yet to be realised. Farinetti's appendix, though useful (especially for establishing that, at least today, 78% of the island is fertile or averagely fertile), does not look at environmental change. For example, was Lemnos always as timber-less as it is today (p. 367), and if so where did Hephaistia's metalworking industry (pp. 84, 110–16, 133, 173) get its charcoal from? An archaeobotanical study might provide answers. Likewise, F. notes that many of the island's farms are equipped for wine production: Second World War aerial photography has been used at Eresos on Lesbos to identify ancient terracing, and the technique might likewise be useful here in establishing the extent of ancient vine cultivation (G.P. Schaus and N. Spencer, AJA 98 [1994], 424–30). However, that there is much left to do is only to be expected from such a vast topic. For now, F. has performed an important service by mastering such a wealth of scholarship, and her book showcases the exciting work being done on Lemnos.