Communities in Transition is an edited volume which brings together a great number of specialists in the Neolithic and Eneolithic period (fifth and fourth millennia bc) of the circum-Aegean area, in an effort to present the state of the art regarding archaeological research in this area. Following a preface and introduction, the book is organized into six main sections (Parts I-VI). The first of these consists of introductory and overarching studies (Part I), while the core of the book is organized by geography into five parts: the Balkans (Part II); north Greece and Thessaly (Part III); west, central, and south Greece (Part IV); the Aegean islands, Crete, and Cyprus (Part V); and west Anatolia (Part VI). Each of these parts consists of chapters covering one or more of the following topics, as set out by the editors: chronology and culture history; material culture (technology, production, use, and meaning); changing social structure and economy; inter- and intra-site use of space; settlement patterns; and caves. It is not possible to mention each of the fifty-seven chapters here, therefore I will focus on the most interesting and relevant ones, the choice inevitably being subjective.

Part I is perhaps the most important part of the book since its overarching chapters identify and summarize the main problems. The spatial domain of the book is pragmatically defined by the term ‘circum-Aegean Area’, which essentially involves the central and eastern Balkans on one side and the Aegean area plus western Anatolia on the other. This makes perfect sense given the complex connections between societies and cultures in these regions. The temporal domain of the volume is (too?) widely defined, although it is evident from chapters in the introductory part and from individual case studies that the main focus is the period between 4500/4200 bc and 3000 bc—the so called ‘missing millennium’. This term sums up our ignorance about several related topics. The fifth millennium bc was a very dynamic millennium, especially in the Balkans and Thessaly, as the Early/Middle Neolithic transformed into the Late Neolithic and Eneolithic. This transition was accompanied by regional and settlement-level population increase, social and economic intensification, and a major technological development: the invention of copper metallurgy (Porčić, Reference Porčić2018). By the end of the fifth millennium the rich and diverse world of the Balkan Eneolithic seems to disappear: large settlements and cemeteries were abandoned, pottery styles changed, and the archaeological record of the fourth millennium seems to be impoverished compared to the previous millennium. At the same time interesting new developments occurred in southern Greece and the Aegean islands, such as an increase in the number of settlements, expansion of the pastoral economy, increase in cave occupations, and long distance trade (Demoule & Perlès, Reference Demoule and Perlès1993). Chapters in this part, especially that by Colin Renfrew (Ch. 1, ‘Inventing the Final Neolithic’), set the stage for the important questions that the studies in this book are concerned with in a direct or indirect way: (1) Why did (E)Neolithic communities of the Balkans and Thessaly disappear or transform by the end of the fifth millennium, and is this related to climate change or to migrations from the Pontic steppe? (2) What was happening during the fourth millennium in the circum-Aegean region in terms of demography, society, and culture? (3) How and why did the late fourth-millennium communities transform into the first Bronze Age communities, leading to the development of complex societies and urban settlement in some parts of the study area (e.g. the Peloponnese, Crete, and Asia Minor)?

Part II consists of studies from the Balkans, most of which are problem-oriented. The chapter by Aleksandar Kapuran and colleagues (Ch. 7, ‘Settlement Pattern Changes during the Central Balkan Copper Age’) provides a useful synthesis of the changing settlement patterns in the central Balkans between 5300 and 3000 bc, clearly demonstrating the difference between the Late Neolithic Vinča world and the post-Vinča (post 4500 bc) communities. The disappearance of the Eneolithic world in Bulgaria at the end of the fifth millennium bc is discussed by Petya Georgieva (Ch. 9, ‘Possible Approaches to Tracing the Fate of the Population of the Varna, Kodjadermen-Gumelniţa-Karanovo VI, and Krivodol-Sălcuţa Cultures’), who argues that migrations from the steppe induced by climate change were the main factor behind this cultural change. The chapter by Inga Merkyte (Ch. 8, ‘Modeling the Black Box: Bulgaria in the 4th Millennium bc’) is an interesting methodological contribution aimed at reconstructing patterns of inter-community interactions. Merkyte applies the method of social network analysis to the metallurgical data from Bulgaria, identifying differences in the network structures between the Copper Age and Bronze Age. The greatest apparent difference between Copper and Bronze Age networks is that the former tend to be more spatially clustered, whereas the latter seem to be more continuous. However, no methodological details are presented which makes it difficult to evaluate the analysis and to compare the results to a similar study by Radivojević and Grujić (Reference Radivojević and Grujić2018), who applied social network analysis methods to chemical composition data from metal objects of the same period and area.

Although demography was identified as a key issue by Renfrew in the first chapter of Part II, very few studies in any part of the book deal with this issue directly and in a methodologically relevant way. For this reason Chapter 14 by Mariusz Kufel and Łukasz Pospieszny (‘Rethinking the Absolute Chronology of South-Eastern Balkans in the Later Half of the Fifth and in the Fourth Millennium bc’) stands out, as the authors attempt to reconstruct population dynamics in the southeastern part of the Balkans using the method of summed calibrated radiocarbon probability distributions (SCPD), mostly based on radiocarbon dates from Bulgaria and northern Greece. Their results show a decrease in the SCPD curve around the middle of the fourth millennium bc, which they interpret as a hiatus. At best, these results can be considered exploratory, as the more sophisticated recent methods of SCPD analysis (e.g. Timpson et al., Reference Timpson, Colledge, Crema, Edinborough, Kerig, Manning, Thomas and Shennan2014) were not implemented in this study. Other chapters in this part of the volume present site reports from Neolithic and Eneolithic settlements and cemeteries, or interesting synthetic studies of different classes of material culture, including graphite ornamented pottery (Ch. 15 by Agathe Reingruber, ‘Graphite and Carbon: Relative and Absolute Chronology between the Aegean and the Black Sea in the Fifth Millennium bc’) and lithic technology (Ch. 16 by Ivan Gatsov & Petranka Nedelcheva, ‘The Lithic Technology on the Territory between Lower Danube and Marmara Region: Sixth-Fifth Millennium bc’).

Part III is focused on north Greece and Thessaly. The chapters in this section are mostly single-site case studies. In Chapter 18 (‘The Chronological and Social Dimensions of the Late Neolithic I-II and the Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age Transitions in a Long Lived Settlement in Northern Greece (Dikili Tash, Kavala District)’), Zoï Tsirtsoni and colleagues use radiocarbon data from the famous site of Dikili Tash to demonstrate a hiatus between the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods. Chapters by Maria Pappa (Ch. 19), Eva Alram-Stern (Ch. 20), and Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika (Ch. 21) focus on the Neolithic sites of Makryalos and Thermi, Visviki, and Theopetra cave, respectively. It is rather surprising that most of the chapters in this part of the book are quite narrow in their scope, given the long tradition of research on the problem of the Neolithic in Thessaly (Andreou et al., Reference Andreou, Fotiadis and Kotsakis1996; Demoule & Perlès, Reference Demoule and Perlès1993; Halstead, Reference Halstead1999), and given the issues related to sociocultural change in Thessaly raised by Kotsakis and Mina in their chapters in Part II of this book. The last two chapters, by Stella Katsarou (Ch. 22) and Stratos Nanoglou (Ch. 23), focus on Neolithic pottery and figurines, respectively. Katsarou's chapter (Ch. 22) is difficult to follow due to heavy use of post-processual jargon and underdefined concepts (temporality, eventfulness), but, if I understood correctly, the central argument is that the Middle Neolithic/Late Neolithic divide was not real as there are several ‘hybrid’ sherds that show that the transition did not involve a discrete change from one period to another, but a series of contingent changes in practices of individual potters. Nanoglou, meanwhile, concludes that the multi-headed and acrolithic figurines of the fifth millennium reflected temporal perceptions and distinctions of the people who made them—they represented a distinction of the past and the present where there was none before (in the sixth millennium). The problem with this kind of conclusion is that it is actually a hypothesis that seems impossible to test.

The studies in Part IV relate to the regions of western, central, and south Greece. The majority of chapters in this part of the volume are site reports from caves, uncovering the rich material record often associated with ritual and symbolism. When it comes to studies that address wider issues, the title of the paper by Bintliff and Sarri (Ch. 24, ‘Demographic Transitions from the Earlier Neolithic Stages until the First Early Bronze Age Settlements in the Plains and Hill-Country of Boeotia, Greece’) promises to address demographic transitions from the Neolithic to the Bronze Ages, but it ultimately fails to provide any explicit demographic discussion or conclusion in the text.

Part V consists of chapters dealing with the archaeology of the Aegean islands, Crete, and Cyprus. There is a great diversity of topics in this section, including site reports from the islands of Thasos (Papadopoulos et al., Ch. 36), Imbros (Erdoğu, Ch. 37), Andros (Televantou, Ch. 40), Kos (Georgiadis, Ch. 41), and Gavdos (Kopaka & Theou, Ch. 46) that present primary archaeological data from the fifth and fourth millennia bc. The three chapters by Nowicki (Ch. 42), Di Tonto (Ch. 44), and Todaro (Ch. 45) are very interesting from a wider perspective, since they are concerned with sociocultural dynamics in Crete during the fourth millennium, which preceded and set the stage for the rise of the complex societies in the Bronze Age. It is also interesting to mention the study by Žarko Tankosić (Ch. 38, ‘Land Management in the Final Neolithic/Early Bronze Age Aegean? Some Tantalising Indications from Southern Euboea’) who uses the results of the Euboea survey project to hypothesize that in the Final Neolithic and Early Bronze Age large areas were free of settlement and were used as agricultural land to produce quantities of cereals far exceeding the needs of the local population, suggesting a large-scale land management system.

The final part of the book (Part VI) is about west Anatolia. Chapters from this part are in most cases focused on the fifth millennium bc and are almost exclusively single-site case studies, including Gülpinar (Takaoğlu, Ch. 49), Yeşiltepe (Takaoğlu & Bamyacı, Ch. 50), Yeşilova Höyük (Derin & Caymaz, Ch. 51), Ulucak (Çevik, Ch. 52), Liman Tepe (Tuncel & Şahoğlu, Ch. 53), Çukuriçi Höyük (Horejs & Schwall, Ch. 54), Çine Tepecik (Günel, Ch. 55), and Tavabaşi (Korkut, Işın & Takaoğlu, Ch. 56). In light of the central topic of the book it is important to mention the study by Horejs and Schwall (Ch. 54, ‘Interaction as a Stimulus? Çukuriçi Höyük and the Transition from the Late Chalcolithic Period to the Early Bronze Age in Western Anatolia’), who discuss networks of interactions, the presence of craft production, and settlement characteristics in the fifth and fourth millennia bc, concluding that the foundations upon which Early Bronze Age societies were formed can be identified in the fourth millennium. This conclusion may be true in some general sense, in that all these elements might have been present before the Early Bronze Age, but it does little to explain the process of transformation. The chapter by Çevik (Ch. 52, ‘What Follows the Late Neolithic occupation in Central-Western Anatolia? A View from Ulucak’) may be of great interest to Balkan archaeologists as it shows that black burnished pottery had appeared at Ulucak c.5600 bc, which is c.300 years before it appeared on other sites in Anatolia and the Balkans. The introduction of black burnished pottery in the second half of the sixth millennium bc is a phenomenon of wider significance in southeast Europe as it marks the beginning of the Late Neolithic cultures, the most notable being the Vinča culture in the Balkans (Garašanin, Reference Garašanin, Boardman, Edwards, Hammond and Sollberger1982).

This book is an ambitious attempt to summarize the Neolithic and Eneolithic archaeology of the circum-Aegean area. Its success in this is partial, since the quality of contributions varies and there is an uneven coverage of topics within the different geographical sections, many of the chapters being essentially summary excavation reports of individual sites. Such studies are certainly useful as illustrations and as sources of reference for the regional archaeology, but fall short of the problem-oriented approach, or at least systematic representation of evidence, suitable for a comparative study. The regional and problem-oriented chapters are the most interesting components of this volume and contribute the most to its stated agenda, but what is still missing is some kind of a synthetic overview of the presented research. The overall impression is that the book does not function very well as an integrated whole. On the other hand, to be fair to the editors, with so many authors and contributors coming from different countries, research institutions, and academic traditions, it would be difficult to achieve a more focused and uniform approach while retaining the desired breadth of coverage. Therefore, regardless of the shortcomings, this is a very useful book. It is the most comprehensive attempt to bring knowledge from this wide region and from different archaeological traditions together in one place, especially for the ‘problematic’ fourth millennium. This is no small achievement, as most of the information is buried in inaccessible local journals, site reports, and published in different languages. Therefore, given the wealth of information, it will certainly be a worthy reference book and a good starting point for scholars interested in the prehistory of southeast Europe and the Aegean.