This book is the third volume in the series Patrimoine Photographique that was launched in 2012 by the École Française d'Athènes (hereafter EFA). The first two volumes, published in 2012 and 2014, were accompanying exhibitions and were initiated on the occasion of the 100th anniversaries of the French excavations at Thasos (1911–2011) and Philippi (1914–2014) respectively. The volume dedicated to Delos serves a somewhat different purpose as it focuses on the first 40 years of the French exploration of the island, Delos being the first site whose study was entrusted in its entirety to the EFA by the Greek government.

The publication is trilingual, with text and captions written in French, Greek and English. The volume is arranged in two main parts. The first part contains the main body of text (pp. 47–61 for English). Although concise, this section is fairly comprehensive. It includes an overview of the ancient history of Delos between the third millennium bc and the sixth century ad, information about the island's first cartographers, travellers and explorers, and a list of the English and French scientific expeditions that surveyed and excavated Delos in the second half of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is prior to the recognition of Greece's independence. This introductory information is followed by longer and more detailed chapters about the history, scope and results of the excavations, surveys and other research projects conducted on Delos by the EFA, between its official initiation in 1873 (it followed after some reconnaissance missions in 1847, 1864 and 1869) and 1913. Those years marked a period of intense and almost continuous archaeological activity on the island – excavations at Delos were temporarily suspended from 1895 to 1901 when the EFA focused on the exploration of Delphi instead. Chapters of the first part of the volume also tackle issues of methodology, publications, diffusion strategies, restoration and recording of the French archaeological activity on Delos, with emphasis on drawings and photos. What are surprisingly missing from the text are references to the images contained in the volume.

The second part of the volume provides a rich collection of carefully selected images comprising maps, photographs, manuscripts, notebooks, drawings, paintings, architectural plans and reconstructions, even caricatures (figs 23–5), arranged thematically in seven sections: ‘Delos before the Excavations’, ‘The Men’, ‘General Views’, ‘The Sanctuary of Apollo and its Surroundings’, ‘The Theatre District’, ‘Mount Kynthos and the Upper Inopos Valley’ and ‘Areas North of the Sanctuary of Apollo’. Reproduced in high-quality format, these images offer an insight into archival material of primary importance that illustrates beautifully not only the history of the excavations and the quality of their documentation but also the human, social and historical aspect of how archaeology was performed in Greece during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The layout of the volume, the high quality of its content (both of text and of illustrations), the presentation of little-known documents and the inclusion of a three-page selected bibliography (pp. 157–9) make it appealing both to experts and to the general public. Future volumes of this series are highly anticipated.