Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: Current Issues.

• Author: Knapp, A. Bernard
• Position: Book review

Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: Current Issues. Edited by EFFIE ATHANASSOPOULOS and LUANN WANDSNIDER. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY MUSEUM, 2004. Pp. xii + 242, illus. $39.95.

Ever since the onset of regional archaeological survey projects in the Mediterranean (arguably the British School at Rome's Central Italy and South Etruria Projects), not long after the publication of Gordon Willey's pioneering Viru Valley Project in Peru, it has seemed obvious that there is no single disciplinary canon to guide those who conduct field surveys, no blueprint for establishing a field methodology. Indeed, the very diversity of regional survey archaeology in the Mediterranean, and the very different histories, organizational and institutional structures, and attitudes to both methodology and theory within Mediterranean countries themselves, are what make the field so dynamic and interesting. More recently, however, and in particular with Mesoamericanist Richard Blanton's critical review ("Mediterranean Myopia," Antiquity 75 [2001]: 627-29) of the massive, five-volume set The Archaeology of Mediterranean Landscapes, ed. G. Barker and D. Mattingly (Oxford: Oxbow, 1999), it has become evident that practitioners of certain "schools" of regional archaeological survey no longer deem alternative or varying approaches to be equally viable.

The volume under review comprises revised versions of ten papers (plus an editors' introduction) first presented in an electronic symposium, "Crossroads in Mediterranean Landscape Archaeology," at the Society for American Archaeology's annual meeting in April 2001. It is co-edited by two scholars trained in very different archaeological traditions: Athanassopoulos (Old World or Mediterranean culture historical-geographic tradition) and Wandsnider (New World or Americanist processual tradition). The volume strives to bring together a diverse array of case studies stretching from eastern Spain (Barton et al.) to the Black Sea's Sinop peninsula (Doonan) and to the Jordanian plateau (Hill), and from the Middle Palaeolithic to the "Modern" periods, a temporal span of some 35,000 years and a spatial expanse of some 3700 kilometers (east-west). Wilkinson, moreover, supplies a chapter comparing and contrasting Mediterranean and Near Eastern survey methodologies, the latter avowedly extensive in approach and, as Wilkinson emphasizes, usually conducted at the "expense" of the "offsite" survey record, upland settlement, and habitation in the semi-arid steppe zone of the region. The attempt to produce a coherent volume out of all this diversity was no easy editorial task. How...