Bassi's is an ambitious book, one that takes aim at a longstanding crux of Classical scholarship, the relation between history, philology and archaeology. Casting this relation as a divide between the ‘study of words and the study of things’, Bassi hopes to build a bridge out of the proposition that the past is constituted out of a dialogical exchange between what is seen in the present by narrators (and their characters) and what is read by bibliophiles, both ancient and contemporary. Admirably, the book shows how a close reading of objects within canonical Classical texts is of relevance to how these fields articulate the past, which she holds to be their shared object of concern. Meticulously researched, intelligent, lucid, and well written, this book is of relevance to more than practitioners of classical archaeology, a discipline built upon the premise of connecting what remains on and in the earth with what is written in books, for it takes up questions fundamental to how all archaeologists look at, and talk about, their objects of study.

Bassi begins with a brief discussion of museum studies, where the act of seeing objects within houses of the Muses is mediated by reading (about) them, both literally, whether in catalogues or captions, and metaphorically, as a mode of engaging them. Here one encounters both a competition and interplay between acts of reading and seeing objects in forming, and holding meaning about, the past. An analogous exchange is to be found in Greek narratives where ‘the act of reading texts is linked with conceptualizing the past as a receding visual field’ (p. 7). These texts, for Bassi, may be described as ‘protoarchaeological’, a term that is capacious and intentionally anachronistic. With protoarchaeological narratives the past flares up in the friction and exchange between ‘empirical observation and linguistic representation’. Upon this theme the following five chapters turn, carefully working over three key core ideas: ‘the dominance of vision in making truth claims, the role of language in distinguishing fiction from fact, and the criteria for establishing a past reality’ (p. 8). Through fresh readings of what she regards to be protoarchaeogical narratives, Bassi hopes to bring all Classicists to the table around a concern for how we write about our objects of study, an engagement shared with ancient authors themselves involved with the disjuncture between what is visible and what is legible. For this reader, there is more to be said with respect to this aspiration and Bassi's treatment of archaeology in the epilogue, but we will come to this below.

Chapter 1, ‘The Landscape of the Past in Hesiod's Theogony’, aims to disclose the protoarchaeological effects of visible objects in the poem—Hesiod's laurel sceptre, the falling anvil and the stone used by Gaia to trick Chronos. If the effective qualities of the thing itself—a staff that upholds a standing performer, a heavy bronze anvil dropped from earth to measure the distance to Tartarus, a stone exhibited at Delphi and later seen by Pausanias—are missing, then it is because the object in question is a textual one whose qualities are framed by the text. Indeed, to situate the sceptre as a prop within a performance does not, for Bassi, go far enough. The sceptre distinguishes Hesiod as chosen by the Muses, serving to mediate an unresolved conflict between Muse-bestowed knowledge and the direct witnessing of actual events.

Chapter 2, ‘The Hypothetical Past and the Achaean Wall in the Iliad’, is an astute exploration of the protoarchaeological potential of the wall erected by the Greeks to protect the ships from destruction by the Trojans. For Bassi, the wall's meaning is ‘expressed in the relationship between what happened in the past and what can be seen—or not seen—in the present’ (p. 41). Relegated to oblivion by Apollo and Poseidon, by destroying the wall, according to Homer, the gods guarantee that it will pass, not to reuse or ruin, but to fame. Tracing the narrative history of the wall, Bassi builds a case where ‘the past is constituted in an ongoing negotiation between the truth claims of empirical observation . . . and those of linguistic representation’ (p. 63).

Chapter 3, ‘Blinded by Time’, contrasts the blind bard Demodocus, the catalogue of ships and Helen's reportage in what is known as the teichoscopia. In this, the longest chapter in the book, Bassi shows how within the Odyssey one may find two very distinct ‘evidentiary modes’ of witnessing the past, those of a sightless singer and a seeing speaker. Whereas the former draws upon divine inspiration, the latter speaks of events seen with their own eyes. Bassi resists the urge to see protoliterary attributes within Homer and thus draws us even closer to the text by refusing to turn its readers into spectators of epic performance. If, despite the orality of the culture, Bassi skilfully maintains the metaphor of ‘reading the past’ throughout, then it is because one begins with the textual object.

Chapter 4, ‘Up to My Time’, enlists the work of Frank Ankersmit and Alois Riegl in an exploration of objects regarded as evidence for a perpetually perishing past in Herodotus’ Histories. After establishing a loosely analogous relationship between Ankersmit's distinction between ‘looking through’ and ‘looking at’ historical texts, and Riegl's age value and historical value, Bassi moves on to analyse descriptions of the offerings of the Lydian kings in the Histories. By situating the fate of these objects in light of Ankersmit's philosophy of history and Riegl's history of art, Bassi finds an opportunity to reflect on historiography and the reading of history. Throughout this chapter one gets a sense of Bassi's talent for drawing the things described back into the fold of the text. For example, rather than rendering Herodotus’ purposely failed description of the Egyptian labyrinth in book 2 as an example of the inadequacy of words to grasp the thing experienced by the historian, Bassi views it as an instance of evidentiary framing where the ‘reading of history is equated with the impossibility of seeing it’ (p. 140). This impossibility rests on more than the fact that things change with the passing of time, for, in Ankersmit's terms, ‘looking at the historical text becomes an effect of the reader's realization that she cannot look through it’ (p. 143).

Chapter 5, ‘Tragedy Vanishes’, delves into the Frogs, a work that Bassi deems to be foundational for literary and cultural criticism; for within Frogs readers find a window on ‘the dialogic relationship’ between reading a fifth-century tragedy, whose power is already diminished by the croak of the Aristophanic Chorus, ‘and watching one where the latter activity takes place in a visually receding past’ (p. 145). Assuming dramas to have been experienced as both a performance that was observed and text that was read allows Bassi to render the desire to witness the play in performance in a double sense, as an aftereffect of references within the text to reading tragedy and of the text's reference to its enactment in the theatre. Yet again the protoarchaeological effect of the narrative is expressed in the competition between reading about the past, in this case a tragedy, and seeing it, in this case its original performance. The impossibility of seeing is key to constituting the past.

The introduction on ‘seeing the past’ is balanced by an epilogue on ‘reading it’. Reading the Past serves ‘as a trope aimed at the gap between archaeological objects in the world and their description in language’ (p. 186). Negotiating this gap, for Bassi, is a fundamental ‘condition of [archaeology's] production’, one that is akin to how objects are enrolled as evidence for the past in protoarchaeological narratives. From Eberhard Sauer's Archaeology and Ancient History (Reference Sauer2004) to Ian Hodder and Scott Hudson's Reading the Past (Reference Hodder and Hudson2003), Bassi aims to demonstrate how these authors, and by extension archaeology as a whole, hold to arbitrary hierarchies of value where material evidence is more direct and concrete, less arbitrary and convoluted (despite its ambiguity), than textual (or literary) evidence. Here again one encounters something analogous to that antagonism between seeing objects and reading texts found within protoarchaeological narratives. Unlike archaeologists who see their objects—as opposed to texts—as providing more ‘tangible evidence of the past’ (p. 187), Bassi avoids the trap of denying words their due as artefacts. Admirably she holds reading texts to be no less of a way of dealing with things than freeing relic walls from the soil. Bassi goes on to illustrate further the tension between seeing objects and reading texts, and an ‘implicit desire’ to safeguard the ‘prediscursive’ attributes of objects through an admittedly schematic treatment of Christopher Tilley's phenomenological approach and Robert Preucel and Alexander Bauer's archaeological semiotics. (Missing are Tilley's pertinent Metaphor and Material Culture (Reference Tilley1999) and Preucel's book-length treatment of the topic, Archaeological Semiotics (Reference Preucel2006).) While Bassi is correct in that the tension between the archaeological object and the text has been overdramatized within this selection of works, she is wrong to take these works as indicative of archaeology at large.

If it is difficult for an archaeologist to do justice to the nuance of Bassi's textual analysis, then one might suppose the same to be true for a literary scholar who takes on what is framed as the core attributes of archaeological discourse in a 15-page epilogue. Indeed, it is with her treatment of archaeology that the volume falls short of its ambitions, at least for this reader. This failure to bridge the fields of history, philology and archaeology is not an artefact of that divide wherein historians and philologists study words and the archaeologists study things. Rightly, Bassi characterizes this taxonomy as reductive—by shifting emphasis to the question of why distinctions between objects and texts (which is another type of object) were formulated in the first place (p. 201), she steers clear of maintaining this divide. Rather, the shortfall is to be found with Bassi's treatment of archaeology, a discipline whose discourse she reckons to be framed by this ‘relationship of words to things’.

For all her measured engagements with the idiosyncrasies of this selection of archaeological texts, Bassi finds a common thread across them in a desire to defend ‘a persistent empiricism within the discipline, founded upon the prediscursive reality of visible and tangible objects positioned in an original place and time’ (p. 194). That the field has long called into question Sauer's aim to ‘arrive at a greater truth about what actually happened in the past’ (p. 187) finds no mention here. That archaeology has long understood itself as engaging, not the past per se, but what has become of it, receives no recognition. If Traces of the Past gains in its fidelity to texts, it loses in its failure to accommodate the surplus reality that exists apart from them. This failure is problematic beyond the scope of this review, but several points can be made here.

To begin with, it is true that academic culture is dominated by texts. But there is so much more that is unsaid and that is meaningful—the precise joints within a stretch of polygonal masonry, a lookout tower facing the harbour. For Bassi to overdramatize the relationship between only two types of entities—texts and material objects—and, thus, to consider this relationship as more fundamental than others—an archaeologist-with-trowel and a compacted surface or radioactive isotopes of carbon and atmospheric oxygen—is to miss how meaning is not limited to the text and the world is bewilderingly rich beyond its measure. The past is shaped through writing about events, and objects that remain, or what becomes of them, and this can be portrayed, in the way of Bassi, as a dialogic between the things out there and the texts that describe them. But pasts are also produced apart from language or texts: in how the ruination of a building occurs through interactions with rain, microbes, or tree roots; in how we, whether archaeologists or agrarians, recognize change in that which is unfamiliar, in architectures out of place, in grasping a figurine dredged up from dark depths of the soil. These things possess their own unique qualities for holding their own pasts. For example: what has become of a polygonal wall on the Aspis of Argos does not gain its reality from elsewhere. Rather, the past that is achieved from working with texts and what has become of ancient walls is a relational object that may or may not impact the ways that people experience remains on the Aspis and what archaeologists make of them. The wall, now excavated and presented to passersby, nonetheless exceeds its past and the relational object that situates it as the wall behind which the Argives gathered in defence of their city. To champion one past—a literary past—above others is to transform what remains to fit a privileged set of expectations which cannot be there, for the soil does not hold a past in the way of the Histories of Herodotus; a section of stone wall does not, and cannot, carry such interpretive burdens. In the process of fulfilling its narrative potential for history, we obliterate other pasts—what becomes of the wall—whatever the traces. This can be rendered as a question of fidelity, one type of fidelity to historical accounts, another to an erstwhile fortification wall turned goat enclosure turned garbage dump turned terrace turned quarry. How is it that the historical text intervenes to benefit one meaningful past above so many others?

Ultimately, what Bassi characterizes as ‘a desire to preserve the ontological integrity of archaeological objects’ (p. 188–9) is less an issue of defending archaeology's empirical ground than trying to come to terms with that which resists the text, that which holds a surplus reality beyond it and cannot always be evaluated through it. This is the point of Bjørnar Olsen's plea, which grounds his book In Defense of Things (Reference Olsen2010), namely that objects have been relegated to ‘oblivion and displacement’. For Bassi lightly to brush aside this plea as an overstatement on the part of Olsen is to disregard those non-discursive aspects of things that surpass their relations to texts and in the process allow her normally balanced authorial voice to waver. According to Bassi, Olsen's attempt to engage ‘things qua things’ lacks clarity with respect to how archaeologists might access this ‘meaning’. This, for her, leads us into a Catch-22, for how else are we to engage things? How else, indeed! Here, Bassi overlooks a significant difference to be found in archaeological texts, the presence of maps, illustration and photography. Though they may be framed by text, these other modes of engagement, along with video, sound, or other affective manifestations, permit archaeologists to translate something of those qualities that words alone cannot convey.

Clearly the ‘relationship between objects and texts as sources of evidence for what happened in the past’ (p. 188) is important, yet there is so much more to archaeology as a field that enters into direct engagements with ceramic-littered surfaces, chamber tombs, or stone chests containing inscribed bronze straps. Virtually nothing is said of the archaeological process, which negotiates the so-called radical divide between the material world and text. It is not that an archaeologist begins with a ‘prediscursive’ material world and moves to ways of discussing it—there is no direct route from one to the other. Both the concrete and tangible aspects of ceramics, mud brick, or stone socle and their legible, compatible and textual qualities are simultaneously defined through a long process of transformation that results in the fine edge that is the archaeological publication, among other things—archives, collections, archaeological sites, etc. Bruno Latour's powerful notion of circulating reference reminds us how there is not one yawning gap between what remains of Troy and our descriptions of it, but multiple ones, bridged by a chain of reference between notebooks, labels, lists, catalogues and articles and objects undergoing definition in the course of fieldwork and laboratory study, archives and typological comparanda. Yes, the ‘dialogic interplay between empirical observation and linguistic representation’, a dynamic central to protoarchaeological narratives, ‘conditions the ways archaeologists talk about their discipline’ (p. 201), but only in part.

My point in entertaining these seemingly trivial details is that they are central to any dialogue that Bassi may wish to open between historians, philologists and archaeologists. We cannot ignore the ways that texts have come to define objects of archaeological concern, but neither can we subsume them to other objects or subject them to an anthropocentric notion that meaning is everything. Archaeologists are obliged to resist appropriating things over to neat stories of the past, or rendering them as detached from their present situation. This is why common ground is not to be found in a shared starting point, but in a mutual telos, that may or may not take shape in the form of literature.