The Romans first became involved in Anatolia (roughly the non-European parts of modern Turkey) in the second century BC, controlled it from the mid first century BC and continued to do so until the seventh century AD, with the western parts remaining Roman until the eleventh century AD. As they had spent time in Anatolia, fighting, administering and then simply living, Romans of all sorts would have been aware that this land had a long history. Those who had read Herodotus might remember tales of a Lydian kingdom and the Achaemenid Persian conquest, while others might have seen inscriptions in non-Greek alphabets and rock carvings of unfamiliar figures. Starting with Lucan's description of Julius Caesar at Troy, so important for the origins of the city of Rome itself, Rojas presents a series of fascinating anecdotes concerning various Roman encounters with these past Anatolians and their landscapes between the second century BC and the fourth century AD.

The introduction lays out the terms used, making clear the distinction between archaeology and antiquarianism (neither of which the Romans practised), and Rojas's preferred term for those ancients interested in the past: “archaeophiles” (p. 6). The next three chapters discuss encounters between Romans and the Anatolian past in archaeology and in textual sources, focusing on individual interpreters (Chapter 2), traces (Chapter 3) and horizons (Chapter 4), although the differences between Chapters 3 and 4 seemed a little blurred to me. The coverage of time and space is wide; while the focus is on the better documented western parts of Anatolia, a fifth and final chapter, ‘Beyond Anatolia’, also discusses similar cases of Roman interactions with pasts in Spain, Corinth, Sicily and Egypt. Rojas's expertise in handling this diverse group of evidence is impressive. He knows Anatolia well, both past and present, and has a good grounding in the literary sources too. Highlights for me included the dancing priest Craterus, commemorated in a Greek inscription on a Hittite monument at Kızıldağ, a mountain overlooking a seasonal lake, and the discussion of Cicero's account of his ‘rediscovering’ the tomb of Archimedes in Sicily. The discussion of personified mountains could have justified more space. The case study of St Ariadne of Prymnessus also suggests the possibilities of Christian material for examining these same themes of interaction with the past beyond the early fourth century AD.

In addition to a skilful exposition of the evidence for Romans encountering the past at particular times and places, Rojas also has a strong interest in methodology. At repeated moments, he points to our tendency to be concerned with only one period of a site, to the ways that other, often later, interpreters handled the same sites, or the modern tendency to privilege vision over smell or taste in thinking about the past. Categorising the work is difficult (it is historical but too anecdotal to be a history), but it is really interesting, well-written and, at under 200 pages, a quick read. Most importantly, it is thought provoking, and I came away thinking much more than before about the people living both in the past and in the present in places where I have worked in Anatolia. Most classical scholars will enjoy reading this erudite work, while those working in fields where texts are not as important may find themselves reflecting on differing ways to interpret places and material assemblages.