Beginning in 2013, the University of Heidelberg (Germany) in collaboration with Mekelle University (Tigray, Ethiopia) conducted four seasons of fieldwork at the site of Mifsas Baḥri near Lake Ḥashenge in southern Tigray. Investigations, under the direction of Paul Yule, focused on the excavation of a Christian building and a later cemetery at the main site, and on a survey of the surrounding territory. The resulting volume provides the reader with exhaustive documentation of the evidence recorded, along with a link to an online database of around 2200 images and record forms.

Chapters 1–3b present the excavation and survey, Chapter 5 is a short petrographic analysis report and Chapters 6a–7b provide description and analysis of small finds, lithics and pottery. Two chapters deal with architecture, stratigraphy and chronology (Chapters 9 and 10), and three discuss nineteenth-century cartography of the Lake Ḥashenge region, local agricultural terminology and oral traditions (Chapters 4, 11 and 12 respectively); Chapter 13 offers an overall conclusion. The chapter on the human remains from the cemetery, Chapter 8 by Svenja Partheil, should be singled out as the first comprehensive reconstruction of the demography and palaeopathology of an ancient community in northern Ethiopia.

The Mifsas Baḥri Archaeological Project is the first to conduct fieldwork intended to investigate the progressive shift of the ancient Ethiopian state from the northern to the central Horn of Africa during the most obscure period of Ethiopian history, in the late first millennium and early second millennium AD. This is therefore an important book and the editors must be praised for making their results accessible to scholars so soon after the conclusion of the fieldwork. A short delay in publication, however, might have allowed for better language editing and for a more coherent structure; in particular, Chapters 4, 11 and 12 should have been presented as appendices insofar as they do not provide any significant contribution to the archaeological investigation.

The absence of a precise description of the stratigraphic sequence at Mifsas Baḥri is a significant problem and may jeopardise the interpretation of the excavations as a whole. In fact, the authors of Chapter 10, on the stratigraphy and chronology (Hilbrig and Yule), honestly admit that no precise correlation between the soil layers, architectural remains and artefacts could be defined during the fieldwork. Therefore, the reader can only understand that there was a sequence of finds (mainly potsherds) based on the absolute depth of the materials, a sequence of walls more or less in a stratigraphic order and a small number of radiocarbon dates, which cannot be directly associated with the walls. Such problems notwithstanding, the excavations at Mifsas Baḥri indicate that a building, with apparently two or three phases of use, was erected in the seventh to eighth centuries AD. In the earliest phase, the building had an indented plan similar to those of the elite residences and churches of the Aksumite polity (c. 400 BC–AD 800) in central Tigray and Eritrea. This building may have been a church on account of the presence of several quadrangular columns decorated with crosses; as, however, the date at which these crosses were carved is unknown, it remains uncertain whether the building really was a church. The pottery consisted mainly of reddish-brown and grey/black wares, reminiscent of the ceramics used in the northern regions of the Aksumite polity during the period of decline in the seventh to eighth centuries AD, although the shapes and decorations are often different. Subsequently, in the early second millennium AD, the site was used as a cemetery.

Individually, the editors of the volume suggest two contrasting interpretations of their results. According to Michela Gaudiello, Mifsas Baḥri was “an important southernmost outpost of the Aksumite kingdom during the Late Aksumite Period” (p. 149). According to Paul Yule, however, “Mifsas Baḥri lies well outside the main sphere of Aksum and has a strong local cultural flavour of its own” (p. 272). This contradiction could probably have been avoided with closer editing of the text and better communication between the editors in order to arrive at a joint interpretation. On the basis of the data published here, this reviewer agrees with Yule's opinion. The evidence presented by the authors does not support Aksumite dominion over the region and indicates that Christianity penetrated from Aksum to the south only in the late first millennium AD. The absence of crosses as decoration on vessels suggests that the local community was not fully converted at this time. Conversion was probably only completed in the early second millennium AD, as inferred from the absence of grave goods associated with burials, in conformity with Christian funerary rituals.

The presence of pottery comparable in style to the ceramics of the Aksum region of the first millennium BC at sites around Mifsas Baḥri is a significant result of the project. This discovery may indicate that communities with ceramics linked to the tradition of central Tigray also occupied the territory of Lake Ḥashenge, and they may have connected the northern communities with those of the African hinterland. Further fieldwork will be necessary to confirm the evidence and its significance.

In conclusion, this volume is a crucial contribution to the archaeology of the Horn of Africa, providing new information about a region that hitherto has not been investigated by archaeologists. It should be read by any scholar interested in the archaeology and history of this region.