The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece Footnote ¹ is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.

From the same publisher, somewhat surprisingly, comes Christopher Mee's Greek Archaeology. A Thematic Approach.Footnote ² ‘Surprisingly’ because, although the chronological scope of this book does not match Bintliff's grand sweep, there is still considerable overlap, and a predilection for the longue durée evidence yielded by field survey is shared by the two authors. In ten chapters, Mee covers seven millennia, and studiously avoids a classical bias (au contraire, there may be ‘a preference for the primitive’ here, with more discussion of Middle Neolithic pottery than of Athenian black-figure). His organizational principle, however, is thematic – thus ‘Settlements’, ‘Residential Space’, ‘Warfare’, ‘Religion’, for example. This risks the possibility that a reader may resent being dragged back to the Neolithic with every chapter, but capitalizes on the premise that a ‘rapprochement’ has been reached between the study of Aegean prehistory and the ‘classical archaeology’ of Greece from the Archaic to Hellenistic periods. In academic terms, this may be so – though offhand I struggle to imagine university departments where the Stone Age and Alexander the Great belong to the same degree course. Whether the archaeological scene yet allows us to discard the concept of ‘Dark Age Greece’ is perhaps more debatable. To say that ‘the darkness has been partially dispelled’ (22) is, of course, the overture to introducing Lefkandi. But, as the author also observes, field surveys have tended to confirm a remarkable depopulation of Greece after the collapse of Mycenaean palace culture. What happened in the eighth century still seems like a ‘Renaissance’.

Classical archaeology is extended in the opposite temporal direction by the essays collected in Architecture of the Sacred.Footnote ³ ‘The construction of sanctity through architecture within the early historical cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean forms the main theme…of this volume’ (365). An introductory overview by Jas Elsner concludes by claiming that the various contributions challenge ‘the traditional assumptions of a single clean break between pagan polytheism and Christianity’ (19) – but I am not sure that such ‘traditional assumptions’ were ever very strong, and in any case the authors here seem rather reluctant to trace continuities of sanctuary usage from classical to early Christian and Byzantine times. This seems a missed opportunity, especially when one considers those distinctly ‘removed’ classical sanctuaries, such as Labraunda in Caria, where the reoccupation/adaptation by Christians appears all the more striking. But there is much here to engage readers concerned with the articulation of ‘ritual space’ in the classical world, Judaism, and Byzantium; and we are reminded of the ‘connectivity’ between East and West not only in Christian terms but in classical too – as clear from C. Brian Rose's account of ritual and mythographical coordinates between Athens, Rome, and Ilion.

‘Ilion’ denotes Troy as it was developed in Hellenistic and Roman times – ‘Troy VIII/IX’. For Homer, as Richard Evans reminds us in his A History of Pergamum,Footnote ⁴ Troy was also ‘Pergamos’, the fortified citadel par excellence. The assumption of the name by what was a minor settlement in the Troad region in the fifth century bc perhaps carried little ideological significance at the time. But it was a gift to the Attalid dynasty that opportunistically established itself there during the commotions that ensued after Alexander's death. The story of this dynasty is a good one, worth retelling, and Evans offers the modest hope that his version offers ‘relatively straightforward access’ (ix) to the ancient literary sources and archaeological evidence. Alas, ‘straightforward’ survey of the ancient sources only serves to reveal how scant and slanted they are – recall how little we know of when and how Attalus I defeated the ‘Gauls’ by the River Caïcus – and Evans does very little with the archaeology by way of compensation. A miserable section of indifferent touristic photographs of the site seems only to confirm his antipathy to this resource, for whose handsome extent readers should see the recent exhibition catalogue, Pergamon. Panorama der antiken Metropole (Berlin, 2011).

It was a properly ‘momentous’ turn of ancient history when Attalus III, dying in 133 bc, gave his kingdom by last will and testament to Rome. It may be that the Romans already felt in possession, strategically, of Pergamum, and that the inland site could not compete with Ephesus as a viable provincial capital. But inheriting the citadel, and all its royal treasures, surely forced the Romans to reassess their own cultural identity. Masters of military logistics, builders of roads and aqueducts, they must now become librarians, and curators of objets d'art. The process by which they became so is recounted in Steven Rutledge's Ancient Rome as a Museum.Footnote ⁵ Pergamum, ‘Athens of the East’, had in effect obliged Rome to become ‘Athens of the West’. In due time the Horatian quip about conquered Greece captivating Rome became appropriate, and Rutledge devotes a substantial part of his story to the phenomenon of collecting and displaying nobilia opera in the late Republican and early Imperial city. Yet the stuff of Roman patrimony was not only artworks seized from Greece. There were all sorts of natural curiosities to accommodate too (e.g. the enormous tusks of the Calydonian boar, confiscated from the Arcadians by Augustus as retribution for their support of Antony); and, of course, there were the relics of Rome's own history, which by the late first century bc had been organized into something like a heritage trail. Where the book shows weaknesses is in some of the archaeological detail: comments on the Laocoön group, for example (74–6), are all somewhat misleading, and it seems strange to make no allusion to the claimed discovery of the Lupercal. But Rutledge makes a sympathetic investigation into the symbolism and status of such memorabilia, and his account of their contribution to Roman identity is plausible.

What use was a statue by Lysippos (say) when compared to an aqueduct? The Romans – quite rightly – prided themselves upon hydraulic engineering, and their pride was sometimes expressed with attendant disdain for fine art. But waterworks did not have to be oppressively utilitarian – as we register from the ornate fountains reconstructed and explained in Brenda Longfellow's Roman Imperialism and Civic Patronage.Footnote ⁶ Splendid waterworks had been created in late Republican and Julio-Claudian times for the landscaped retreats of wealthy individuals: it was the Flavians who ‘transformed the fountains from domestic symbols of luxury into powerful statements of imperial control’ (32), raising the standard with their ‘makeover’ of the Augustan Meta Sudans – a far more impressive landmark, to judge from coin images, than its modest remains suggest. The empire, however, offered most opportunities for grandiose installations, and we can agree with Longfellow that fountains and nymphaea at sites in Greece, Asia, and North Africa show water as the ‘primary display element’ for Pax Romana. The thousands of people who, passing along Kuretes Street in Ephesus, pause or pose by the Nymphaeum or Hydrekdocheion ‘of Trajan’, may be forgiven for supposing that emperor to have been a generous benefactor: to this day one can see fragments of his colossal image there. Yet, for the literate, a fairly prominent inscription makes clear that the fountain, marking the end of an aqueduct bringing water some twenty miles from the Lesser Maeander river, exists thanks to a local couple, Aristion and his wife, Julia Lydia Laterane; and Aristion specifies that the entire project was paid for at personal expense (ek tôn idiôn). So to classify this monument as a ‘statement of imperial control’ is perhaps over-emphatic; at any rate, it is at least conceivable that Trajan had earned the local affection thus shown to him.

More obvious marks of imperial control are surveyed in Rebecca Jones's Roman Camps in Scotland.Footnote ⁷ Perhaps fittingly, military reconnaissance in later times did much to reveal the existence of these temporary structures; the development of aerial survey, by O. G. S. Crawford and his successors, has contributed greatly to a gazetteer of such sites that now tallies over 150 beyond Hadrian's Wall. Tents were rather like those once favoured by the Boy Scout movement, and the camps appear of simple structure – rectangular enclosures, with rampart and ditch, perhaps a palisade, and modest gate defences. But some were of considerable size (able to accommodate, if that is the right word, between 20,000 and 40,000 troops), and evidently not merely the overnight resting places of an army on the march. One of the northernmost camps lies at ‘Deers Den’ near Kintore in Aberdeenshire: subject to a recent programme of excavation and analysis, this corral extended over a hundred acres, and may have been occupied for over a month – so much is indicated by the quantity of rubbish middens and ovens, along with evidence for some light ‘industrial activity’ (routine maintenance?). This volume, complementing similar studies for England and Wales, should assist historians plotting the Flavian, Antonine, and Severan forays into Scotland: the definitive location of Mons Graupius, however, continues to elude us.