The Western Desert, a sub-region of the Sahara, comprises some two-thirds of modern Egypt's land area and extends from the Mediterranean coast into Sudan in the south. This sprawling, rolling expanse is marked by sandstone hills and dunes, and pocked with a chain of topographic depressions that follow the line of a single aquifer that arcs through the desert, forming five major oases that have sustained human occupation since the Neolithic. These oases—Siwa, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhleh and Kharga, running from north to south—have a long and complex history of interaction with the states established in the Nile Valley, but until recently, it was thought that one of the low points in their collective histories was during the period of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt (323–31 BC). This interpretation arose by way of a contrast with the picture of the subsequent Roman period drawn by scholars from the written sources. The latter had been taken to suggest a moment of renaissance, when the depressed oasis towns of the Ptolemaic period were reinvigorated by Roman interest in the trade networks of Egypt's peripheral deserts, both East and West, and a concerted effort to develop oasis agriculture.

The colour and contour of this Roman interest in the oases of the Western Desert has been provided by many decades of archaeological work, notably at Dakhleh Oasis where an Australian team has been labouring since the late 1970s. These excavations have produced a wealth of material evidence for Roman-era life in Dakhleh, but have had considerably less to say about the scale and character of Ptolemaic activity that, for the reasons outlined above, was thought to be minimal. The present volume, a modified version of the author's 2014 Monash PhD dissertation, goes a long way towards correcting the errors that underlay that earlier assessment, offering a critical new tool that should prevent any repetition of such problems in future studies.

The introductory chapter frames the problem by briefly outlining the history of archaeological research in the oases, with particular emphasis on Dakhleh, and summarising the historical evidence for the relationship between the oases and the Nile Valley in the Ptolemaic period. In the second part of the volume, Gill lays out the assemblage of Ptolemaic pottery from Mut al-Kharab (Chapter 2, Appendices 1 and 2), a sub-area of the larger Dakhleh project area and the probable site of a major Ptolemaic temple. In this district, pottery was found in stratified contexts along with ostraka of Ptolemaic date and other artefacts, and Gill carefully presents these archaeological contexts trench by trench.

His essential method is that of all good ceramicists—he dates his pottery through comparative work with Ptolemaic material recovered from well-dated loci in the Nile Valley, and looks to the documents and other objects found in association with the pottery for further refinement of his dating. In Gill's hands, the results produced by this mundane methodology are rather exciting, for he offers a substantial corpus of diverse Ptolemaic forms and wares from Mut al-Kharab (a notable achievement in its own right), which provides definitive proof that there was substantial activity in this area during the Ptolemaic period despite the absence of any associated architecture, and in contrast to the established narrative of Ptolemaic decline. Using this material as a starting point, he then offers an overview of the broader pottery traditions of the Dakhleh Oasis in the Ptolemaic era (Chapter 3). He characterises the fabrics, wares, decorative systems and forms that are typical of this period and offers specific parallels with material from the Nile Valley (Appendix 3).

In Chapter 4, he brings this new understanding to bear on the evidence collected during surveys conducted by the Dakhleh Oasis Project. These surveys were often cited as proof of the limits of Ptolemaic activity at Dakhleh because only 17 sites were thought to have material of this date; in contrast, Gill presents the reader with a catalogue of 72 Ptolemaic sites (Appendices 4 and 5)—the result of his more comprehensive knowledge of Ptolemaic pottery. This is a cautionary tale for survey archaeologists everywhere. Survey data are particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation when the pottery corpus for a region is not well understood; at Dakhleh, the Ptolemaic material was simply missed by scholars who were not particularly interested in problematising the received historical narrative.

In his last two chapters, Gill broadens his view and moves beyond Dakhleh to evaluate the impact of this new understanding of the Ptolemaic pottery on the broader region. Chapter 5 offers short but informative summaries of Ptolemaic remains at the other Western Desert oases. While in some cases he re-evaluates published pottery data to offer new insights, in most instances he does not have access to unpublished data and has to rely on the conclusions offered by the excavators about the nature and extent of the Ptolemaic evidence. Given the radical changes in the picture at Dakhleh in the light of Gill's study, it seems fair to assume that a re-examination of this material is now warranted. A systematic catalogue of the sites discussed is presented in a separate section (Appendix 6).

The conclusion (Chapter 6) is in some respects the most interesting part here to the non-specialist reader, providing a broader discussion of the impacts of Gill's observations on our understanding of the nature of Ptolemaic settlement and economy. His primary conclusion is that the Roman boom in the Western Desert is a mirage; the population of the oases was already growing in the Ptolemaic period, and that these changes are best contextualised as part of a broader state initiative to develop marginal regions, particularly in the third century BC. Joe Manning and others, myself included, have made this point for Upper Egypt more broadly as well as the Eastern Desert, so Gill's observations offer a welcome and substantiated elaboration on this position.

This volume makes a significant contribution on the archaeology of the Dakhleh Oasis. More importantly, however, Gill's study provides a manual for others working in the wider region who will now be able to recognise and characterise their own Ptolemaic pottery, or who will be able to say with certainty that it is indeed absent. This is, one hopes, simply the first step in articulating a corpus with more developed sub-phases and regionally specific observations beyond those offered in this volume.