Susan Alcock

The Roman Empire had a rich and multifaceted visual culture, which was often variegated due to the sprawling geography of its provinces. In this remarkable work of scholarship, a group of international scholars has come together to find alternative ways to discuss the nature and development of the art and archaeology of the Roman provinces. The result is a collection of nineteen compelling essays-accompanied by carefully curated visual documentation, seven detailed maps, and an extensive bibliography-and organized around the four major themes of provincial contexts, tradition and innovation, networks and movements, and local accents in an imperial context. Easy assumptions about provincial life in Rome-from what makes a province to how they interacted with metropolises-give way to more complicated stories. Similarities and divergences in local and regional responses to Rome appear, but not always in predictable places and in far from predictable patterns. The authors dismiss entrenched barriers between art and archaeology, center and provinces, even "good art" and "bad art," extending their observations well beyond the empire's boundaries, and examining phenomena, sites, and monuments not often found in books about Roman art history or archaeology. The book thus functions to encourage continued critical engagement with how scholars study the material past of the Roman Empire and, indeed, of imperial systems in general.

more than twenty-five years ago, John Cherry looked forward to the day when archaeological survey projects working around the Mediterranean region (the 'Frogs round the pond') would begin to compare and synthesize the information they had collected. He anticipated researchers tackling big questions of inter-regional scope in new and interesting ways, working at a geographical scale considerably larger than that of the individual survey. Was his optimism misplaced? Despite the extraordinary growth of interest in field survey projects and regional analysis, and despite the developments in survey methodology that have been discussed and implemented in the past two decades, few scholars have attempted to use survey data in a comparative mode and to answer the broad-scale questions confronting social historians. In this volume, which is the outcome of an advanced Workshop held at the University of Michigan in 2002, a number of prominent archaeologists return to the question of comparability. They discuss the potential benefits of working in a comparative format, with evidence from many different Mediterranean survey projects, and consider the practical problems that present roadblocks to achieving that objective. From mapping and manuring to human settlement and demography, environment and culture, each addresses different questions, often with quite different approaches; together they offer a range of perspectives on how to put surveys "side-by-side". Contributors include Susan E Alcock, John Cherry, Jack L Davis, Peter Attema, Martijn van Leusen, James C Wright, Robin Osborne, David Mattingly, T J Wilkinson, and Richard E Blanton.

A group of essays that trace the development of Roman influence in the eastern parts of the empire. Contents include: Urbanization ( Greg Woolf ); Roman colonies in the province of Achaia ( A Rizakis ); Syrian desert ( M Gawlikowski ); The Syrian countryside ( G Tate ); Jewish rural settlement ( Y Hirschfield ); Roman relations with the Persicus sinus ( D T Potts ); The Imperial image ( C B Rose ); The Black Sea region ( David Braund ); Funerary monuments in Asia Minor ( Sarah Cormack ); Tomb architecture at Palmyra ( A Schmidt-Colinet ); Pilgrimage, religion and visual culture in the East ( Jas Elsner ).