Originating as a University of Seville dissertation, this book is an archaeologically centered, broadly diachronic history of late antique western Baetica (central and western Andalusia) from the fourth to eighth centuries CE.

Three parts divide the work. Part 1 surveys Roman and post-Roman Baetica from Republican times to the Arab invasion of 711 (37–64). Part two explores the ecclesiastical organization of Baetica during late antiquity (67–84) before discussing the archaeological evidence for early-Christian western Baetica, arranged on a bishopric-to-bishopric basis from east to west, namely those of Córdoba (Corduba), Cabra (Egabrum), Écija (Astigi), Seville (Hispalis), Italica, and Niebla (Ilipla) (85–253). While conforming, overall, to the external boundaries of Baetica, the author deduces that the bishoprics’ territories deviated substantially from the Roman conventus (juridical districts) limits but maintained, for purposes of control, the Roman road network. Part three first synthesizes the material evidence, namely urban and extramural episcopal complexes with associated churches, colonnades, monumental gateways, and squares, often appropriating Roman civic space (for example, Écija), isolated churches, including martyrial ones, baptismal buildings and baptisteries, monasteries, funerary structures, and inscriptions, including some on sarcophagi (257–297). The final chapter of part three emphasizes, in the absence of extended narrative sources, the centrality of monumental building in revealing an increasingly all-pervasive Christian organization of western Baetica, in which even rural monasteries played a part in controlling the resources of the bishoprics (299–321). This material is compared and contrasted, where possible, with early Christian material and sites elsewhere in Hispania, Gaul, Rome and Italy, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean. In its scope, this book is a first for Spain, and this is no mean feat given the problems of the evidence: nearly all urban remains lie underneath modern buildings, mostly emerging through scattered emergency digs occasioned by construction. Older excavations produced inadequate site plans, stratigraphies, and inventories. Rural archaeology is equally difficult, as most ancient architecture has been reduced to wall stumps and footings by agricultural activity or damaged by pillagers. Nonetheless, much ancient material survives, including inscriptions and constructive/decorative elements, making site and ground plans sometimes feasible and occasionally allowing glimpses into the evolution of building types, such as baptismal pools (273–276) and even building phases (151–162 and Figs. 24–25, for the church of Coracho near Cabra). Altars and inscriptions, particularly dated ones commemorating bishops and other Christian elites, disclose foundation dates and hint at the location of churches and other monuments that would be otherwise undocumented or known by name alone.

The author is selective, emphasizing monumental building, eschewing, mostly, iconography and liturgy, in order to underscore his thesis and argument that a new, Christian architecture emerged quickly in the fourth century and that monumental architecture best reveals the implantation of Christianity as a manifold project, at once religious, political, social, and economic. This architecture thus reflects the desire of Christian elites, mostly the successors of local Roman elites, to exercise authority by the creation and maintenance of de facto independent, territorially competing episcopal proto-states in Baetica. These realms emerged with the end of Roman rule in Baetica in 422; suffered from and survived the wars of the Vandals, Suevi, and Visigoths; coexisted with a brief Byzantine presence in the Guadalquivir valley; flourished under the stable rule of the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo; and persisted under Umayyad rule. A theoretical underpinning of the author's “architecture of power” is the application of Sudjic's idea (quoted at 28–29; Sudjic not in bibliography)—that building is not only a pragmatic venture but also one that discloses the psychology of the builders, particularly their ambitions—to late antiquity.

Site discussions produce, on occasion, interpretive problems. The dating of the vast semicircular cryptoporticus and central basilica at Cercadilla in Córdoba's northwestern suburbium to 320 and its identification as an episcopium, built by bishop Ossius with Constantine's support, cannot be correct (113–120, 260, 301). An inscription dedicated to the Caesars Constantius and Galerius (CIL II²/7: 260a), which in a missing portion named the Augusti Diocletian and Maximian, was set up in baths adjoining the basilica and dates to their completion. The baths share the masonry support of a portion of the north wall of the basilica and are contemporaneous with it, as the baths’ hydraulic system feeds directly into a monumental fountain within the basilica itself, a feature overlooked by the author. The text dates between 293 and 305, indicating that the Cercadilla central complex was secular in origin. In addition, pottery (sigillata africana C Hayes) in the footings of the cryptoporticus offers a date range of circa 275 to the first years of the fourth century (R. Hidalgo, Espacio público y espacio privado en el conjunto palatino de Cercadilla (Córdoba): el aula central y las termas [Junta de Andalucia, 1996], passim, esp. 35 n. 21, 64–65, 136 Fig. 71, 141, 143–147). It is not enough to dismiss the originally one meter wide plaque as a “mere inscription” (117) without discussing its original location and chronological implications. The burial of Bishop Lampadius at Cercadilla in 549 and the gold ring of Bishop Samson show Cercadilla's eventual Christian use; nevertheless, its origins are civic, possibly intended as the seat of the tetrarchic governors of Baetica. At Priego de Córdoba, tegulae (roof tiles) dated by thermoluminescence to around 350, which cover a possible bishop's burial (170-171), do not necessarily date the interment to then, because they could have been reused at a later date.

Factual errors appear. Hispania Ulterior Baetica was not the “first province outside Italy” (37): Sicily was. Tiberius's reign begins 14 CE and not “14 BCE” (43). The “collegium corporis fabrorum sub(a)edianorum Patric(i)ensium Cordubensium” cited (52 n. 7) as evidence of corporations of municipal workers at Corduba in the fifth century appears in an inscription from AD 247 (CIL II²/7: 188).

The blurry reproduction of many maps and site plans makes it often difficult to follow the discussion in this ground-breaking and imaginative work.