The publications of the Antibes colloquia in archaeology and history have a long and illustrious history from their beginnings in the early 1980s, successively identifying themes of topical interest (sometimes quirky, but none the worse for that) and bringing together diverse groups of scholars to address them. The present volume is a worthwhile addition to the list, with its focus on the settlement history of the Mediterranean littoral coastal zone. The title of the opening essay by the editors, ‘Pour une étude de la genèse des implantations humaines en milieu littoral méditerranéen’ (pp. 13–19), emphasises the beginnings of such histories as the special focus that they intended for the meeting, but in fact the section on changes in the landscape at the time of the initial phases of new foundations consists of only 4 papers, compared with 22 presenting case studies dealing with organisational changes after initial settlement (or re-settlement). Though the outcome is a rather unbalanced volume in terms of what may have been intended at the colloquium planning stage, the resulting collection is of considerable interest because the work presented in mostly summary form in the papers ranges widely both in time, from the Middle Palaeolithic (somewhat anomalously) and later prehistory to Byzantium, and space, with contributions dealing with most countries fringing the Mediterranean basin. In the latter respect, as M. Gras notes in his concluding reflections (pp. 435–42), the volume moves beyond the traditional focus of many of the colloquia on classical antiquity and the northern side of the Mediterranean.

The first section (eight papers) addresses the environmental and anthropic (cultural) contexts of littoral settlement, with the question posed in the title to the section: ‘existe-t-il des modèles de référence?’ The papers include a series of regional settlement trends with an emphasis on relatively traditional topographical considerations, on Greek colonisation in Magna Graecia and Sicily (P.G. Guzzo), ‘Romanisation’ in coastal Provence (M. Pasqualini) and ‘Arabisation’ in the Tangiers region (P. Cressier). Two studies with a stronger geoarchaeological component examine the inter-relationship between cultural and environmental change at the landscape scale in the case of the Garigliano valley in central Italy (K. Ferrari et al.) and at the single locality in the case of the port site of Ulmet in the Camargue (C. Landuré and C. Vella). The only paper that takes a more generalising approach is the semi-quantitative survey by G. Bony et al. of ancient harbours, with examples drawn from across the breadth of the Mediterranean, from Byblos to Carthage, a study that brings out the particular vulnerabilities of locations exposed to alluviation.

The papers in the second section discuss Roman-period foundations at Bolonia near Gibraltar (P. Moret and F. Prados Martínez), Valencia (A. Ribera I. Lacomba), Tarragona (J.R. de Arbulo Bayona) and Narbonne (C. Sanchez et al.). The first three are largely topographical surveys integrating archaeological finds with documentary references. The piece on Narbonne is an excellent example of an inter-disciplinary study combining geomorphology, palaeoenvironmental studies, geophysical survey and excavation in a study that brings out well the complex interplay between human attempts to modify a highly volatile alluvial landscape and changes in the latter, including those induced or exacerbated by human actions that were beyond the technologies of the day to control.

The third section consists mostly of regional and site-based case studies of littoral settlement, with a strong emphasis on classical antiquity. Prehistoric studies are represented, in addition to the paper on the famous Middle Palaeolithic site of Ksar ‘Akil in Lebanon (M. Pagli), by a study of Beaker-period (Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic) settlement in southern France (O. Lemercier et al.) and an excellent geoarchaeological analysis of human/environment interactions in Neolithic times on the Nice plains, one of the few papers that really addressed what I expected would be an underpinning theme of the volume: the complexity of people/landscape interactions in the Mediterranean's past. Diachronic studies of settlement trends from prehistory to medieval times include Tripolitania in western Libya (K. Schörle and G. Lucarini), the Clef valley in Algeria (B. Boussadia et al.), the environs of Fréjus (P. Excoffon and N. Portalier, with L. Purdue), Saint Marguerite island near Cannes (P.-Y. Larrat) and the Nice littoral (R. Mercurin et al.). Classical-based regional studies discuss the territories of Emporiae (Empordà) and Valentia (Valencia) (M.J. Ortega et al.) in Spain (the former being one of the few studies of land division in the entire collection), Calabria (G. Cordiano) and the Po valley near Padova in Italy (M. Matteazzi) and Istria in Croatia (V. Bon and F. Tassaux; É. Fovet et al.). In the same genre are the papers on the medieval landscapes around Tarragona (A. Virgili) and Valencia (J. Torró et al.). The site-based studies concerned primarily with the Greco-Roman period are on Cap du Llibrell on Ibiza (J. Ramon Torres), Potentia in Adriatic Italy (F. Vermeulen), Rhegion in Magna Graecia (E. Insolera) and Myra and its port in southern Turkey (I. Pimouguet-Pédarros and N. Çevik).

Given the case-study approach of virtually all the papers, it is left to M. Gras in his excellent and thought-provoking concluding paper to reflect on the opening question by the editors in their planning of the conference, about whether trends and commonalities can usefully be drawn in the landscape histories of the Mediterranean littoral zone. Whilst eschewing environmental determinism and emphasising historical contingency, he comments on how the idea of the littoral that is the book's theme chimes with F. Braudel's ideas of the ‘Mediterranean world’ created by its sea (The Mediterranean in the Ancient World [2001]) and with P. Horden and N. Purcell's similar notion of connectivities in The Corrupting Sea (2000). In fact, discussion of such cross-regional connectivities is notably absent in the papers, though implicit in some of the studies of the landscape signatures of Greek colonisation in Italy and ‘Romanization’ processes in the western Mediterranean. Another rather lost opportunity is the absence of discussion in support of M. Gras's reflection on the role of the littoral as the boundary or liminal zone between the hill country edging the plains in many regions of the Mediterranean basin, on the one hand and the deep sea on the other: ‘le point d'articulation entre les chemins de la mer et ceux de la terre’ (p. 439), for example the ‘moteur des émigrations’ (p. 438) of the archaic Greeks in search of cultivable land and mineral resources. He concludes by reflecting how the Mediterranean littoral is no longer a marginal or peripheral space, citing the effects of mass tourism and industrial chemical plants, and how it is also an increasingly disputed landscape in the context of the voyaging of desperate migrants from Africa and Asia seeking landfall on the shores of southern Europe (‘les tragédies de Lampedusa’, p. 442). From their deep-time perspective, he suggests (p. 442) that archaeologists need to play their part in illuminating the complex relationship between land and sea through Mediterranean history: ‘à nous de savoir analyser et mettre en perspective ces tensions que le monde contemporain fait semblant de decouvrir comme s'il avait oublié les drames de la mer qui parsément notre histoire’.