This book may seem an odd title for review in American Antiquity, given its focus on a small region of Greece, but the volume is of interest—conceptually and methodologically—to a broader group of anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and scholars interested in long-term changes in society, technology, and culture. At the center of the study is the notion of “chorography,” which in Christopher Witmore's usage is more than just a systematic description or mapping of a region. It is the “art” of describing a region or district. To this end, Witmore utilizes a timeless mode of ambulatory writing—in a sense channeling the second-century AD periegete (tourist/traveler) Pausanias or his seventeenth-century Ottoman counterpart Evliya Çelebi—but brings it fully into the modern world. On the surface, the result may seem to be a type of phenomenology on steroids, but it is much more. It is the sort of narrative—accompanied by appropriate drawings, photographs, and maps—that would be wonderful to have for each discrete region of the world (I wish, for example, that there had been iterations of this book about Oaxaca or Peru when I first ventured as an archaeologist/tourist of the Classical world to these places).

Witmore's chorography is presented across 27 chapters, cast as “segments.” The segments cover the eastern Peloponnese, from the isthmus of Corinth to Mycenae, Argos to Asine, and from Ermioni into the Saronic Gulf. A map—or “flat projection”—accompanies each segment, and these are all presented near the end of the volume and are composed by Caleb Lightfoot (who also painted the view of Kazarma with Mount Arachneo in the distance that is on the cover of the book). Fundamental to these projections are “lines,” brought to the fore by Tim Ingold in his monograph Lines: A Brief History (2007). Consequently, Chapter 1 deals further with lines in stone (roads, canals, walls, faults, and marine terraces). The chapter/segments are preceded by a preface and a prologue, the latter subtitled “The Measure of the Morea?” (the name for the Peloponnese in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period). There is also an epilogue that begins with a juxtaposition of two ancient authors, Strabo and Pausanias, of whom the former championed—in Witmore's terms—“a form of ethnographic historiography,” largely based on texts, “rather than autopsy, or participant immersion with a locale” (p. 485). In contrast, Pausanias drew “upon a periegetic tradition of in-situ-derived description, where architecture, monuments, artworks, inscriptions, histories, borders, and religious practices were encountered along the road,” and in so doing Pausanias “presented a profusion of grounded detail” (p. 486). It is not difficult to determine in which of these two traditions Witmore resides. The epilogue also has its fair share of self-reflection, and an approach that argues for a diversity of perspectives.

In places, the text is densely written, whereas elsewhere it is more free-form, if not nebulous, and sometimes or often—depending on the perspective of the reader—difficult to follow but always challenging. This is not a book that will appeal to all, and least of all to those who consider anthropology and archaeology to be more hard sciences than anything else, but it will appeal to a broad audience interested in social, cultural, and technological changes through time and how best to describe them. The illustrations are delightful. Those that I found most captivating were the ones that appeared at the beginning and end of each chapter/segment. On the surface, some appeared to be sketches or drawings by a latter-day Jacques Carrey (1649–1726), but others were clearly a photograph that was somehow manipulated or converted into a drawing (the process is not described in the volume). There are photographs, both straightforward and panoramic, a few in color but most black-and-white, as well as plans, and all sorts of other illustrations—including a general view of the plain of Argos by Edward Dodwell in 1834, the flip-top notebooks of the nineteenth-century traveler through Greek lands William Martin Leake (1777–1860), and a drawing of the plant Arbutus by George Wheler published in his 1682 A Journey into Greece. Through the selection of these illustrations, and his carefully constructed text, Witmore has achieved something very rare: a narrative that stands both as a complement and alternative to diachronic history.

In the end, the eastern Peloponnese emerges as an object that is both nuanced and multifaceted. It is, moreover, something that defies oversimplification. It is the objects encountered along its varied paths that complicates the narrative. And this is achieved in numerous ways, with myriad things—such as a storied topos or mythological figure, the grave of a famous archaeologist, a fence barring access to a site, the tobacco plants or lemons or Jerusalem sage found along the way, or the ceramics and bone on the surface of a site. What the volume does achieve very beautifully is to view the transition from an agrarian world rooted in the Neolithic to urban styles of life, with all the baggage that this transformation entails, from communications to movement within a landscape that is both modern and ancient. The result is a highly original long-term habitation of a place, the sort of archaeological narrative that every region deserves.