This volume offers a series of studies derived from recent archaeological work at the site of Butrint. It is the fourth volume in the Butrint Archaeological Monographs Series joining volumes on Byzantine Butrint, Roman Butrint and the excavations at the Trichonch Palace. Unlike these more traditional publications focusing on periods or monuments, this volume brings together seventeen smaller studies that took place with funding from the Butrint Foundation or as part of the Butrint Project. Ranging from the Bronze Age to the nineteenth century, the studies generally make an effort to locate this site within a wider Mediterranean world and contribute valuable context, history and detail to this significant site. More importantly, the volume brings together small studies that might be otherwise lost in a scholarly journal or marginalised in a larger publication.
The first and last articles provide some context for the other studies. Both written by R. Hodges, one of the volume's co-editors, they present the history of excavation and conservation at the site as the primary context for Butrint in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The first chapter begins with a brief note on William Leake's early nineteenth-century visit to the site before focusing on the important work of mid-twentieth century Italian excavation team under the directions of L.M. Ugolini. Funded by Musolini's fascist government, Ugolini hoped to link Butrint to Virgil's Aeneid at a time when the government was reimagining the Roman poem for nationalist and imperialist goals. For Ugolini's Albanian successors, the site represented proof for historical continuity in Albania from the earliest Illyrian groups until the foundation of the Albanian state. Hodges suggests that the only way to counteract this history of nationalist archaeology at Butrint is to produce a similarly robust assemblage of material from the site through large-scale excavation. This statement should remain open to debate.
The final chapter reflects on the efforts of the Butrint Foundation to create the Butrint National Park to protect the archaeology and environment of the site and its coastline. This chapter gives voice to the frustration of attempting to negotiate with both the Albanian national government and the various local concerns in ensuring that the park not only was established, but also maintained. The successes and failures of this ongoing project provide a way to return to his critique of the tensions between globalisation and nationalism. Butrint stands as both an archaeological site and as a historical place within a larger set of forces. The economic realities of operating and imagining an archaeological park in a rapidly changing political environment intersect with the historical forces that created the site over the course of millennia.
The contributions framed by these two chapters present a mosaic of studies on the history and archaeology of Butrint. The chapters are more or less organised in chronological order and alternate between specialised studies on structures associated with single periods and diachronic treatments of part of the site or the landscape as a whole. In Chapter 2, D. Bescoby provides a brief environmental overview of the site in its dramatic setting surrounded by lagoons, marshes and mountains set as a microcosm of Braudel's Mediterranean. In Chapter 3, S. Lima introduces recent research on the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in the region bringing the work at Butrint into contact with the important recent work on Bronze Age Epirus more broadly. Short, more detailed, chapters publish the city's aqueduct (A. Wilson) and a Roman bridge that linked the peninsula to the mainland (S. Leppard). The Roman aqueduct transported water from the hills to the east of the town and may have used a reverse funnel to draw water across the Vivari Channel to the city of Butrint. Clearing vegetation revealed the western end of the Roman bridge that crossed the same channel, clarified the road system on the adjacent Vrina Plain and provided access to the fortified town. I.L. Hansen's section on Roman sculpture from the site includes a catalogue of previously unpublished fragments and a study of two relatively well-preserved Roman period sculptures. Studies of the Castle of Ali Pasha by J.C. Caravajal and A. Palanca and the Venetian period documentary evidence by S. Davies provide valuable evidence for the later history of the site.
Other contributors approach areas of the site in a diachronic way. Greenslade, Leppard and Logue present a useful summary of recent work on Butrint's fortified and monumental Acropolis. This approach complements Greenslade's treatment of the Roman villa, turned church and Medieval elite residence on the Vrina plain. Similarly diachronic approaches characterise the contribution on the two mausolea near the villa on the Vrina plain, on the Well of Junia Rufina and its associated later cemetery, on the Great Basilica, and on the long history of the city walls. These chapters emphasise the reuse of space in the Butrint environs not as a testimony for continuity at the site, but as case studies for the punctuated occupation of the site through time. It is clear, for example, that the site of the Vrina villa saw a series of occupation events, first as an elite villa constructed around a series of courtyards and, after at least one episode of destruction, as a basilica style church, before once again becoming an elite residence.
Like the other volumes in the Butrint Archaeological Monograph Series, this volume pays attention to the interaction between various periods across the site, but there are some missed opportunities to articulate the dynamic interaction between periods of occupation. J. Vroom, for example, engages the complexities of analysing residual artefacts associated with the Wall of Junia Rufina, but it would have been useful if this analysis was extended to other sites and assemblages at Butrint. It is disappointing that diachronic treatments of architecture likewise engaged so tentatively with the use of spolia considering the recent boom in scholarship on this phenomenon. Moreover, there is only a limited discussion of why certain sites saw reuse at various times. The presence of burials, for example, during and after the main phase of the basilica on the Vrina plain suggests that the site may have remained an important religious site through its function as a church and this extended to its reconfiguration as domestic space. It would appear that the mausolea on the Vrina plain also saw periods of later use punctuated by episodes of abandonment. Finally, the two articles on the refortification of the urban area include discussions of the long Venetian period (fourteenth–eighteenth century), but neither do much to engage with S. Davies's short contribution on the history of the region from the Venetian archives.
The penultimate chapter considers the Castle of Ali Pasha on Butrint Bay at the mouth of the Vivari Channel which was constructed in the eighteenth century by the Venetians and modified throughout the twentieth century. The authors may have missed an opportunity here to engage the archaeology of the contemporary past as this site functioned in a modern military capacity. This would have provided a useful segue to the final chapter by R. Hodges which returns to the complex issues surrounding nationalism, continuity and the site's engagement with the wider Mediterranean world. The book is a valuable contribution to the history of Butrint and its environs but also demonstrates the potential and challenges of a diachronic archaeology deeply embedded in a historical sense of place.
