A few years ago, a subtitle such as ‘What the sun was doing in the Roman period’ would have conjured expectations among Classicists of the Sol Invictus cult. Nowadays, it naturally refers to relations between solar activity, climate and ancient history, and stands out among the suite of comparably compelling issues raised by this important bridge-building volume, which seeks to combine new insights from the environmental sciences with humanistic understanding of the Classical world. This volume's origins lie in questions about how to write environmental history for the Mediterranean asked in the introduction to another of H.'s edited works (Rethinking the Mediterranean [2005]), itself a critical response to P. Horden and N. Purcell's The Corrupting Sea (2000), and thereby establishing a genealogy of ideas that, as with so much of the stimulating new research in this field, finds its ultimate source within, or in reaction to, this last seminal work. What the present collection offers is, by admission, an initial, slightly patchy set of engagements with a vast future enterprise, the full outlines of which are still not clear, and much of the data for which do not yet exist, at least in useful form. Among the collective limitations of the papers brought together here are the heavy focus on the Roman period, with only a few venturing earlier (at least for this reviewer, a so-called ‘prehistorian’), and the heavy focus on Italy, to the exclusion, oddly, of a strong and deeply rooted Gallic strand of research around this domain. Far more welcome, if still troubling in terms of disciplinary commitment to the new project among Classicists generally, is the predominance of archaeologists and their ilk. But such imbalances are to be expected during the path-finding phase in a nascent field, ensure that the impact of the first breakthroughs is effectively concentrated and should in no sense diminish the very wide readership that this volume deserves.

Aside from a perceptive and trenchant editorial introduction that sets out much of the current debate, while not sparing some of the following contributors, and an equally cogent conclusion by A. Wilson, the centre-pieces of the volume are two masterly interpretative overviews of climate during the Roman world by M. McCormick and S. Manning, between them sandwiching a less resolved (though in fairness, explicitly hypothetical) piece by E. Cook on the impact of central Asian mega-droughts, and the ENSO events behind them, on the westward movement of the Huns. McCormick and Manning make excellent and complementary back-to-back reading. The former achieves a rare and frankly brilliant melding within an individual mind of climate science and humanism, opening with a demonstration of science's answer to the long-debated date of Ausonius' Mosella, and proceeding through the advantages of rye and thatch (as opposed to tiles) in a colder climate, to what Nile flood records may really be telling us. The degree of consilience (a term championed by E.O. Wilson and deployed here by McCormick) achievable between independent categories of information is manifest. Manning offers a state-of-the-art survey and critical interpretation of the current state of climate science reconstructions for the ancient Mediterranean, ranging from that all-conquering sun to tree rings and speleothems (i.e. stalagmites and related formations). There is an encouraging amount of common ground between these expert treatments. Clearly, at a gross level, the three to four centuries embracing the early floruit of the Roman empire saw unusually warm, wet and (equally importantly) stable conditions, and this optimum then disintegrated, though with uneven geographical patterning. But equally clearly, and unsurprisingly, behind this generalisation lies a mass of fluctuations at a variety of scales, some of which go against the aggregate trend. Fine-grained resolution is therefore essential. In spatial terms, it is worrying that so much of the top-quality information about climate has been obtained from the north-western frontier provinces rather than the empire's Mediterranean point of origin and last resort–had Ausonius been travelling in Syria, Spain or Greece, that year of composition would remain indeterminate. The question of precisely how fine-grained is fine enough when it comes to climate data reveals a small if intriguing difference between McCormick, for whom only annual records will ultimately suffice for a text-rich world, and Manning, for whom decadal is quite good enough to grasp essential processes, and indeed often still beyond our wildest dreams, given the coarseness of most of the sources available–many of which may well misleadingly smear across our timelines discrete climate events. Long-term climatologists would find both settings of the time-slicer unnecessary, and indeed require persuading to extract, record and present their information in such gradations. Behind all this, of course, lie questions that we can begin to grapple with over the coming years. How did climatic phenomena translate into lived environments in the thoroughly anthropogenically-altered conditions of the Mediterranean? What impact did they actually have, both in terms of past perceptions, and with our greater analytical distance and overview? What does it really mean if the Roman and climatic spikes coincided? One emerging possibility is that climate shifts were less critical to the initial making than the subsequent unmaking of ambitious political and economic edifices (though their absence surely contributed substantially to how long such structures endured).

The remaining papers are a diverse bag, although containing some outstanding observations. P. Malanima on the energy consumption of the Roman world makes intriguing reading alongside I. Morris' estimates in a much longer-term and broader perspective (Why the West Rules–For Now [2010]); they reach order of magnitude figures that differ, but alike suggest impressive levels unmatched in western Eurasia until the cusp of recent industrialisation. R. Veal focuses on charcoal as a fuel source. Its archaeological identification is still bedevilled by difficulties in distinguishing between ancient fuel and charcoal created by the burning of wood for other (including accidental) reasons but, as this methodologically strong paper points out, resolution is at hand through the technique known as reflectance, and the scope for exploring local fuel supply systems is nicely advocated by a case study of Pompeii over time. H. himself tackles the definitionally thorny, value-laden and emotive issue of deforestation, and comes to the persuasive conclusion that despite gradual, widespread depletion of woodland, sophisticated management practices prevented wholesale denudation save for some specific and exceptional pressure points in time and space (Classical Attica being a case in point; in general, proximity to big cities, major ironworking and shipbuilding proved bad for tree survival, and distance from easy water transport good). A minor misreading of the Bronze Age evidence here is the implication that Egyptian imports of timber by the third millennium b.c. reflect early deforestation. The Nile corridor had always been tree-poor, and all but entirely lacking in species producing high quality structural timbers; the import of resinous beams of Lebanese cedar by Old Kingdom pharaohs was a mark of their new reach and power to access distant, exotic materials, rather than a measure of local depletion. Of the remaining papers clustered together loosely as ‘Area Reports’, P. Kouki's inability to clinch the link between rainfall shifts and sedentism around Jordanian Petra raises interesting possibilities of a non-relationship, as well as deeper questions concerning just what a ‘favourable climate’ means (for whom, to do what?–even the Last Glacial Maximum was pretty good for some of the Palaeolithic big game hunters of the vast open steppes it created); but it also raises again the spectre of inadequately spatially and chronologically defined data. A Neapolitan team presents a workmanlike geoarchaeological report on two Campanian sequences, but avoids the bigger picture. In a different league altogether is D. Keenan-Jones' riveting piece on the cultural politics of water diversion in the Tiber valley and for the Acqua Augusta, which is outstanding for its ambitious combination of hydraulic, literary and archaeological information, as well as its exploration of the afterlife and consequences of such ancient projects, right up to the present day.

The papers in this volume neatly exemplify the prospects and problems ahead if a successful marriage of environmental–and especially climatic–sciences and the Classical world is to become a reality. As H. states, they primarily address the former's impact on the latter, and tacitly evade the symmetrical issue of what ancient Greece and Rome might tell us about wider planetary transformations in this regard. Now that, for a discipline intending to affirm its place on a drastically changing Earth, is another very good question indeed.