New Books by AIA Members

List and brief description of recent and forthcoming books authored by the AIA membership.

Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered
by Richard J. A. Talbert
The Peutinger Map is the only map of the Roman world to come down to us from antiquity. An elongated masterpiece, full of colorful detail and featuring land routes across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, it was rediscovered mysteriously around 1500 and then came into the ownership of Konrad Peutinger, for whom it is named. Today it is among the treasures of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Richard Talbert’s study presented in Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered offers a long-overdue reinterpretation and appreciation of the map as a masterpiece of both mapmaking and imperial Roman ideology. Here, the ancient world’s traditional span, from the Atlantic to India, is dramatically remolded; lands and routes take pride of place, whereas seas are compressed. Talbert posits that the map’s true purpose was not to assist travelers along Rome’s highways, but rather to celebrate the restoration of peace and order by Diocletian’s Tetrarchy. Such creative cartography, he shows, influenced the development of medieval mapmaking. With the aid of an interactive database, this book enables readers to engage with the Peutinger Map in all of its fascinating immensity more closely than ever before. Contents Introduction; 1. The surviving copy: history, publication, scholarship; 2. The surviving copy: the material object and its palaeography; 3. Design and character of the map; 4. Recovery of the original map from the surviving copy; 5. The original map; Conclusion: the map's place in classical and medieval cartography.
Cambridge University Press (July 2010)
Mycenaean Greece, Mediterranean Commerce, and the Formation of Identity
by Bryan E. Burns
The impact of long-distance exchange on the developing cultures of Bronze Age Greece has been a subject of debate since Schliemann’s discovery of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. In Mycenaean Greece, Mediterranean Commerce, and the Formation of Identity, Bryan E. Burns offers a new understanding of the effects of Mediterranean trade on Mycenaean Greece by considering the possibilities represented by the traded objects themselves in their Mycenaean contexts. A range of imported artifacts were distinguished by their precious material, uncommon style, and foreign writing, signaling their status as tangible evidence of connections beyond the Aegean. The consumption of these exotic symbols spread beyond the highest levels of society and functioned as symbols of external power sources. Burns argues that the consumption of exotic items thus enabled the formation of alternate identities and the resistance of palatial power.
Cambridge University Press (October 2020)
Excavations at Sissi. Preliminary Report on the 2007-2008 Excavations (Aegis 1)
by J. Driessen, I. Schoep, F. Carpentier, I. Crevecoeur, M. Devolder, F. Driessen-Gaignerot, H. Fiasse, P. Hacigüzeller, S. Jusseret, C. Langohr, Q. Letesson and A. Schmitt
Preliminary report on the 2007-2008 excavations at the Minoan site of Sissi in eastern Crete, by the Universities of Louvain and Leuven and Belgian School at Athens.
AEGIS-Aegean Interdisciplinary Studies, Universitaires de Louvain (January 2009)
Ancient Crete: From Successful Collapse to Democracy's Alternatives, 12th–5th Centuries BC
by Saro Wallace
‘Ancient Greece’ with its associations of city states, democratic governance, and iconic material culture, can no longer be envisaged as a uniform geographical or historical entity. The Classical city-states of Crete differed considerably in culture, history and governance from those of central Greece. In this book, Saro Wallace reaches back into Crete’s prehistory, covering the latest Bronze Age through the Archaic periods, to find out why. It emphasizes the roles of landscape, external contacts, social identity construction and historical consciousness in producing this difference, bringing together the wealth of new archaeological evidence available from the island with a variety of ancient text sources to produce a vivid and up-to-date picture of this momentous period in Crete’s history.
Cambridge University Press (June 2010)
The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World
by Sheila Dillon, Duke University
In this book, Sheila Dillon offers the first detailed analysis of the female portrait statue in the Greek world from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century CE. A major component of Greek sculptural production, particularly in the Hellenistic period, female portrait statues are mostly missing from our histories of Greek portraiture. Whereas male portraits tend to stress their subject’s distinctiveness through physiognomic individuality, portraits of women are more idealized and visually homogeneous. In defining their subjects according to normative ideals of beauty rather than notions of corporeal individuality, Dillon argues that Greek portraits of women work differently than those of men and must be approached with different expectations. She examines the historical phenomenon of the commemoration of women in portrait statues and explores what these statues can tell us about Greek attitudes toward the public display of the female body.
Cambridge University Press (February 2010)