The heartland of the medieval Byzantine state (an empire only in the sense of having imperial pretensions), its only large and effectively administered land mass, was Anatolia. Most of its fighting strength, in terms of manpower and matériel, was drawn from this protrusion of Asia into the Mediterranean, an eastern pendant to the Iberian peninsula. The taxes which funded the central apparatus of government were raised mainly there. The perennial problem facing Byzantine historians, dearth of reliable written sources, is much exacerbated when it comes to the economy, society and organisation of Anatolia. Apart from incidental references in campaign narratives, exiguous documentary material (ordered lists of chief officers being the most useful), and lives of local saints (confined in the main to the Anatolian periphery), written sources are silent. Hence the importance of archaeological research, which, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, chiefly in the hands of German scholars working in the Aegean coastlands, has expanded to embrace the whole peninsula and to involve teams from other European countries, the United States and Japan.

The main contribution has been made by urban archaeology, which, once freed from classicist blinkers, has documented Late Antique (4^th-6^th century), Invasion Period (7^th-9^th century), Middle Byzantine (9^th-11^th) and Later Byzantine (12^th-15^th) phases of numerous sites. Summaries of discoveries from a selection of excavated sites in different regions are presented in the volume under review. There has been rather less survey work, both extensive and intensive, of given tracts of countryside, but several projects have deepened knowledge of settlement patterns and economic activity, notably in the Konya plain, the territory around Sagalassos, and areas in Lycia, Pamphylia and Paphlagonia. Not to mention the general surveys of physical traces of the Byzantine past, organised by region, undertaken by the team working for the Austrian Tabula Imperii Byzantini, and specialised surveys of roads (David French) and castles (Clive Foss, Mark Whittow).

Philipp Niewöhner has assembled an impressive cast of archaeologists, varied in terms of country and age, to present the results of well over a century of archaeological research. The Archaeology of Byzantine Anatolia is divided into two parts, the first thematic, organised by topic (‘urbanism’, ‘human remains’, ‘coins’, ‘monasteries’, ‘funerary archaeology’ etc), the second a gazetteer of selected sites with the focus on their Byzantine monuments. There are numerous illustrations, maps and plans to illustrate the text. Like any such collective work, there is variation in the quality of the product. The reviewer all too easily slips into the role of examiner, marking up some contributions – those on houses (the editor), churches (Hans Buchwald and Matthew Savage) and fortifications (James Crow) are masterly brief expositions of their subjects – and marking down others – informative articles on individual cities (Pergamon, Sardis, Sagalassos, Aezani, Euchaita) which are not illustrated with full plans, and one of the two articles on villages (Çadɩr Höyük). Four main regions of Anatolia are represented by the sites singled out for treatment in the second part: (1) the western coastlands – Nicaea, Assos, Pergamon, Sardis, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus, Mount Latmos, and (inland) Aphrodisias; (2) south coast – Patara, Olympos, Side; (3) interior – Sagalassos, Binbirkilise (a late antique religious centre which survived into the Middle Byzantine period), Çanlɩ Kilise (a Byzantine analogue to a group of bungalows in British India, a row of fine rock-cut courtyard dwellings below a Middle Byzantine castle), Aezani, Amorium, Germia (a small city, with its own governing elite, which was also a centre of pilgrimage), Ancyra, two villages (Boğazköy and Çadɩr Höyük), and Euchaita; (4) north coast – two important defended ports, Amastris and Sinope.

To keep the volume to a manageable size, Philipp Niewöhner has had to ration the wordage allowed to contributors and to make an inevitably somewhat arbitrary choice of sites. This reviewer wishes that he had been able to include Smyrna, one of two great Aegean port cities, Attaleia, Byzantium's main naval base on the south coast, Cotiaeum which has well-preserved fortifications, and Trebizond. The outer, more militarised eastern reaches of Anatolia, towards the right bank of the Euphrates and the inner basin of the Anti-Taurus, have also been excluded, along with a series of important sites – Caesarea, Melitene, Sebastea, Tephrike, and two important fortresses, Lykandos and Tzamandos (built in the early tenth century by the Armenian warlord Melias to command the western approaches to Melitene). All sorts of grouses of this sort can be aired, but they do an injustice to the labours of Philipp N and his contributors. Theirs is a useful handbook of Anatolian archaeology, which documents the prosperity of town and country in Late Antiquity, demographic and economic retrenchment in the Invasion Period (cities contracting within strengthened defences), and a modest revival of city life and increasing rural settlement in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Problems of chronology – particularly acute for Anatolia, since Procopius’ survey of Justinianic buildings is confined to sites on or close to the main strategic highway to the east - are confronted squarely and resolved judiciously (as, for example, in the excellent notice on Binbirkilise).

It is not and could not have been a compendium, so numerous and varied have been the archaeological investigations carried out in Anatolia over the last five or six generations. To have included more sites in the second part would have entailed squeezing the first thematic section, when, if anything, it should be expanded, with new sections on castles, roads and bridges, warehouses (apothekai), and surface reconnaissance. The only solution would have been to end each thematic entry with an inventory of relevant sites or material – but such inventories would have become outdated all too soon and would have required considerable labour. The task is, in any cases, largely performed by the bibliography which runs to 60 pages.

A final quibble: it would have been useful, both for non-archaeologist Byzantinists and for budding archaeologists, to have lists of archaeological projects currently under way in Anatolia and their websites.