This substantial new volume in the series of Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World is encyclopaedic in its coverage yet hugely accessible. The two-volume set covers ‘early Greece’, a period between the fourteenth and seventh centuries BC. As noted in the editors’ preface – and as should come as no surprise to the reader, since both Irene Lemos (The Protogeometric Aegean (Oxford 2002), 2) and Antonis Kotsonas (‘Politics of Periodization and the Archaeology of Early Greece’, AJA 120.2 (2016), 239–70) have discussed elsewhere the delicate issue of periodization for Aegean – this chronological framework is intended to bridge the traditional ‘great divide’ between prehistory and classical archaeology. ‘Early Greece’ is not intended as a new paradigm, nor are new chronologies offered that could alienate or disorientate the reader. Simply, in bringing together the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the editors wish to underline that important societal and regional changes in the Greek-speaking world were taking place over the longue durée. And the publication of a volume taking this long-range view is particularly timely: there is a steadily increasing number of monographs on the market that cover together the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (for example, S. Murray, The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy: Trade, Imports, and Institutions, 1300–700 BCE (Cambridge 2017); A. Knodell, Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History (Oakland 2021)).

Volume 1 opens with four thematic overview chapters concerning environment (John Bintliff), archaeology (Oliver Dickinson), written sources (Lisa Bendall and Martin West) and historiography (Antonis Kotsonas). Thereafter follow the two main sections of the volume: ‘State and Society’ and ‘Material Culture and Society’. Although this division is somewhat arbitrary – for the centuries without the evidence of writing, material culture provides most of the evidence for measuring state formation or social complexity – the first set of chapters are broadly thematic, whereas the latter adopt a more object-oriented approach. Historians of ‘early Greece’ who do not necessarily consider themselves archaeologists will also find much of interest in ‘State and Society’, particularly an overview of (predominantly American) state theory by James Whitley; a problematization of the models of ‘migration’ and ‘colonization’ by Antonis Kotsonas and Jana Mokrišová; an argument by Dimitri Nakassis that the economy of both the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age is best understood from the bottom up; and a discussion of gender and childhood by Barbara Olsen, relevant to both archaeological and textual data. Material-oriented chapters in part 3 tip the balance of the discussion in the direction of the Late Bronze Age, particularly in chapters on wall paintings by Andreas Vlachopoulos, seals and sealings by Olga Krzyszkowska and ivories by Iphigenia Tournavitou. This is not an oversight but represents the difficulty in presenting a completely balanced discussion of ‘early Greece’ when there is a relative blank spot for these classes of data from the Early Iron Age. This whole section, though, will become essential introductory reading for students, with a particularly encyclopaedic entry on pottery from Walter Gauß and Florian Ruppenstein, and a useful and informative tabulation for the distribution of metal and stone tools by Nicholas Blackwell.

If volume 1 is geared towards a student or general audience, volume 2 serves a more specialist readership. The editors note in their preface that the Greek-speaking world of the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age is far too vast for any single scholar to cover. Volume 2 therefore aims to help scholars by presenting 19 substantial regional overviews, serving to introduce the reader to salient points of discussion from the various parts of the Aegean and to point in the direction of further reading. The editors set no prescriptive format for these summaries, but chapters generally include a geographic overview, a presentation of settlement data and material culture, and a thematic discussion on the long-term history of the region. There is a weighty bibliography for each chapter, notable for containing many primary Greek-language publications – especially from the local ephoreies (for example, Alexandra Alexandridou on Athens and Attica, and Catherine Morgan on the Central Ionian Islands) and including new and (at least at the time of the chapters’ final submission to the editors in 2017) unpublished data (for example, William Cavanagh’s inclusion of Ayios Vasileios in his chapter on Sparta and Laconia, or Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker’s discussion of the ‘Griffin Warrior’ shaft grave in their chapter on Messenia). The fifth and final section widens our view to the broader Mediterranean, to both areas of Greek settlement abroad and areas in contact with the Greek-speaking world. Here, discussion is necessarily more general, given that, for example, the whole macro-region of Anatolia is allocated the same page count as the much smaller region of Ionia from the previous section. But this is an important section, nonetheless, for reminding the reader that ‘early Greece’ did not exist solely in the bubble of the Aegean.

The production of the volume is of a high-quality, and the division of text into two more easily handled volumes is welcome. The twenty-three black-and-white maps at the start of volume 1 are informative and legible – although they could usefully have been reproduced at the start of volume 2, whose focus is more explicitly geographic. Asmall number of colour plates help to strengthen the argument of avowedly visual chapters on wall paintings (Andreas Vlachopoulos), textiles (Marie-Louise Nosch) and jewellery (Eleni Konstantinidi-Syvridi); but for a volume that is rich in so much data, it is a shame that there could not have been more images. This is not a criticism of the editors – and, indeed, the addition of many more plates would have inflated the cost of this volume beyond what is already quite a steep price tag. But it is a pity that the publishers could not offer a more widely illustrated (and cheaper) online version of this book.

Overall, this is a rich and engaging companion with a novel chronological framework. It will serve both a more general and a more specialized readership, and it stands to be the authoritative introduction to early Greece for a whole new generation of students.