The early Christian churches of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Albania) were constructed to a great variety of designs, from relatively simple hall buildings to intricate and complex tetraconch churches, which were some of the most audacious and inventive structures to be built anywhere in the Christian world in this period. However, the study of all these buildings has been overshadowed, and often hampered, by the ways in which scholars have chosen to examine them. First Josef Strzygowski used them to construct his argument about the origins of Christian architecture in the west, with its dangerous racial overtones. More recently the churches have formed the ammunition in local nationalist agendas about which of the Caucasian states first invented each architectural form, leading to an arms war which pushed the dating of individual buildings ever earlier, on ever slimmer evidence. Annegret Plontke-Lüning's new book takes a fresh look at the evidence for all these buildings, and brings rigour and sense back to the debate. She surveys and studies some 266 buildings, spread over the whole region, from the Black Sea to the Caspian. This was the research for her Habilitationsschrift submitted in 2004, and it provides the architecture of the Caucasus with a more solid and reliable grounding than we have ever had before. The first part of the book sets out the various contexts for the study. It opens with a critical history of the scholarship in both east and west since Strzygowski; and then provides two excellent chapters with clear, concise overviews of the political and ecclesiastical histories of the peoples in the region. These could stand alone as useful historical surveys for those seeking a grounding in Caucasian history. They are supported by a compilation of early sources that refer to the construction of buildings, which is included as an appendix on the accompanying CD-ROM. The second part of the book moves on to the buildings themselves, and with exemplary thoroughness presents all the examples of each type of building. It starts with the simplest hall buildings, and moves on to basilicas and then the ever more elaborate tetraconchs. Each is presented region by region, with clear descriptions and full references. It firmly argues for a later development of architecture in the region and especially for the absence of evidence to date any churches to the fourth century. The typological study of Caucasian architecture has been the dominant approach for much of the last century now. It provides a good means of tracing the development of architectural forms, never more so than in this book, but it leaves them divorced from their functional context: the degree to which form was determined by liturgical practice.The book follows the traditional way of studying these buildings, but still leaves them somewhat divorced from functional issues. The CD-ROM that accompanies the book effectively replaces a plates section of the book, and is presented as a hyperlinked .pdf file, allowing a number of different search options.