Review of: Archœology and Landscape In Central Italy: Papers In Memory of John A. Lloyd. Gary Lock and Amalia Faustoferri, Eds. more

20 Book Reviews Perhaps as an idea for further research and publication, one would like to learn more about the locals’ and tourists’ experience (or even “consumption”?) of the Mykoniots. The author’s best intentions to the contrary, these two groups (native Mykonians and conventional tourists) are portrayed in a vague, at times almost disparaging way. This is without doubt due to the fact that some key informants perceived their temporary or permanent neighbours on Mykonos as monolithic and rather uninteresting categories of people. Locals provide the Mykoniots with lodgings, authentic food grown in some rare surviving garden plots, opportunities to revel in Orthodox festivals, and boat trips to the adjacent islands of Delos and Rhenia. While locals figure as a service-providers, tourists are mainly consumers: they buy drinks, food and objects in bars or shops run by Mykoniots and thus contribute to their livelihood. To some extent, they are also a recruitment pool for the group, producing admirers and disciples. Otherwise they rather seem to disturb, and the main challenge in summer is to live on the island while avoiding contact with plebeian or nouveaux riches tourists. It was a conscious, but in my view regrettable choice of the author not to include any photographs, apart from a single black-and-white full-length portrait in a beach setting on the front cover. The Nomads of Mykonos is an intellectual tour de force and a haunting read, including some touching and thought-provoking portraits of exceptional individuals. Choosing and in some ways creating such an unusual group of informants, Pola Bousiou leaves the well-trodden paths of anthropologists in Greece. For Bousiou’s Mykoniots, the kin group is rather an embarrassment. Unlike Loizos’s Cypriot refugees and Lawrence’s Argolid citrus farmers, they do not aim at founding a family and amassing or preserving property that can be passed on to descendants. Some of them are part of the Greek diaspora in London, New York or India for months or years on a row, returning to their chosen homeland on special occasions only. Their outlook is cosmopolitan, and, characteristically, they befriend rather than reject Albanian immigrants living in the same island communities. The three books reviewed portray groups of Greekspeaking people in very different predicaments. All authors are careful to underline their informants’ interaction with socially, politically or culturally dissimilar communities sharing the same space. To a varying degree and within diverging theoretical frameworks, all three are attentive to historical change. And strikingly—without wanting to nail down an elusive essential character in any way—all Greek or Cypriot people investigated happen to have two things in common: firstly, discourses replete with historical references, in which personal, local and national memories are interwoven; and secondly, a particular attachment to the soil, be it a bag with some cherished earth dug out of a refugee’s former garden and smuggled over the Cypriot Green Line, that unproductive olive grove plot in Argolida that even a debt-ridden farmer would never sell, or the barren Mykonian landscape bathed in bright, “Delian” sunlight and lashed by meltemi winds. A final remark on editorial practices: if, as one might rightfully expect, more books on Greece will be published in the various anthropological series hosted by Berghahn Books, the publishing house might want to decide on a common policy of transliteration of Greek works and citation of Greek references. Lawrence has consistently transliterated all terms, names and book or article titles. Loizos has added several original Greek titles in his bibliography, but oddly some letters come out as question marks. In Bousiou’s bibliography, finally, printer fonts seem to change in the middle of some Greek words. The copy-editing process could surely be improved. References Durrell, Lawrence 1978 The Greek Islands. London: Faber & Faber. Loizos, Peter 1975 The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village. Oxford: Blackwell. Loizos, Peter 1981 The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archæology and Landscape in Central Italy: Papers in Memory of John A. Lloyd. Gary Lock and Amalia Faustoferri, Eds. 2008. Oxford University School of Archaeology: Monograph 69. 253pp. ISBN-10: 1905905068. Kristina Killgrove University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill the Sangro Valley Project is an innovative archaeological venture started in part by the late John Lloyd, in whose honor the papers in this volume were collected. Lloyd and his colleagues brought systematic survey and a diachronic approach to the Abruzzo region of Italy, engaging in intensive surface survey covering nearly 1,500 years of occupation. Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 20–21. ISSN 1535-5632, online ISSN 1556-5823. © 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights Reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-5823.2010.00011.x Book Reviews 21 Following Lloyd’s obituary and a brief explanation of the Sangro Valley Project (hereafter SVP), the first seven papers directly relate to work done by SVP team members in Abruzzo. These papers involve chapters on methodology (One-Four) and interpretation (Five-Seven). In Chapter One, S. Agostini, G. Bertolani, and N. Stivaletta provide carbon-14 evidence of seasonal occupation at a rock shelter dating back to the second millennium BC. G. Lock, in Chapter Two, discusses the use of GIS software and thresholding to investigate anomalies and patterns in data recovered during fieldwalking. GPR is being used in the Abruzzo area, according to K. Schneider in Chapter Three, to understand survey data in three dimensions. Chapter Four bridges the two types of papers by testing field survey with excavation. E. Bispham, K. Swift, and N. Wolff note that they missed a rather large feature upon survey that showed up during excavation. Further, pottery scatters that might signify a site are sometimes taphonomic in nature, not necessarily indicating a subsoil feature. Their goal in the SVP is to make explicit the connection between survey and excavation and to integrate the two techniques. The subsequent three papers are more interpretive in nature. A. Faustoferri discusses one of Lloyd’s favorite topics, the hilltop settlement. She interprets the fortified site of Monte Pallano as evidence of proto-urban planning prior to contact with Rome in the 4th century BC rather than purely a defensive construction. S. Kane adds to the Monte Pallano interpretation with a discussion of architectural terracottas from the site, and she argues that this artwork is important to Samnite identity. The final paper in this section jumps to the Medieval period as N. Christie writes about transhumance in the Sangro Valley. In the Medieval archaeological record, there exist structures of surveillance, likely related to observing the movement of sheep and shepherds in the valley. Christie raises several questions not only about landscape but also about movement through landscape of people and animals; as such, this paper was thematically the most appropriately related to the title of the volume. The inclusion of ten additional chapters comes under the generic heading “Other Papers” in the table of contents. Most of them relate to the Abruzzo region in general, although this area is extended to include Molise and even Puglia. Some are archaeological papers that stay true to the SVP’s methodologies, but others are more solidly art historical in nature (e.g., Ruggeri’s essay on funerary sculptures and Geominy’s on a cult statue of Cybele). The chapters that relate best to the topic of this festschrift include two papers dealing with survey data (Ten and Seventeen), two about necropoleis (Twelve and Fifteen), and one on changes in architectural use (Fourteen). The Iuvanum Survey Project (Chapter Ten) used technology to its fullest extent in linking together databases with GIS information, pottery finds, sites located, and much more in order to understand the survey area, a methodology advocated by Lloyd in the SVP. A. Wilson uses survey data in Chapter Seventeen in a sort of reconstructive demography experiment, creating a mathematical model to understand population size in the Biferno Valley. His attempt at populating the landscape indicates the recovery success of a survey needs to be taken into account in order to produce population estimates. The necropolis papers fall at either end of the chronological spectrum covered by the SVP, from the 6th–2nd century BC cemetery of Santo Venditti (Chapter Fifteen) in Foggia to the 6th–7th century AD cemetery at Villalfonsina in Abruzzo (Chapter Twelve). D. Aquilano discusses the organization of funerary space at Villalfonsina as well as direction of body placement but stops short of relating this site to the local landscape. G. De Benedittis uses evidence from the necropolis of Santo Venditti to argue that the southern limits of Samnite territory extended into Puglia. The chapter on San Martino in Pensilis (Fourteen) takes a diachronic perspective in examining changes in the structure of the villa, which V. Ceglia interprets as indicating reduced agricultural production and a shift towards a more pastoral way of life. Although every chapter in this volume save one (Chapter Sixteen on the landscape of the ager portuensis, located near Rome) relates to the modern Abruzzo region or the extent of the ancient Samnite territory, there is little else to relate most of the papers to one another. The SVP was conceived as covering a vast territory and time period, but the publication lacks a solid introduction that explicitly links the papers into a cohesive volume. The production of the book shows a choice or necessity for including black-andwhite images only; while the photographs do not suffer because of this, most of the graphs (especially in Chapter Two) are extremely difficult to read in grayscale. Many of the papers were translated from the original Italian for English-language publication by the Oxford University School of Archaeology, but the resulting text was not thoroughly copyedited. Archaeology and Landscape in Central Italy provides an interesting overview of the Sangro Valley Project and a look into the life and work of a pioneer in central Italian archaeology, John Lloyd. Archaeologists interested in survey methods would enjoy several of the papers in this volume, both those that lay out the SVP’s methodology and those that modify it to suit their own archaeological surveys. The studies contained in this volume cover a vast range of time, and scholars of ancient Italy, particularly those interested in the Samnites, will find several interesting essays on topics such as defensive settlements, transhumance, cemeteries, ethnicity, and demography. The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe Volume 9 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2009