New Book Chronicle

Is the era of globalisation on the wane or on the cusp of a new phase of extraordinary expansion? US president Trump's abandonment of trade agreements and the rise of protectionism coincide with China's ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, an unprecedented investment in infrastructure across Asia, Europe and North Africa to improve the connectivity of China with its markets by both land and sea. The future is therefore anyone's guess, but what about the past? There has been much discussion by archaeologists about ancient globalisations (most recently, Hodos 2017), but archaeological studies have often typically been set within the looser framework of ‘connectivity’—the interconnectedness of people and places and the movement of material culture and ideas. The books reviewed here are concerned with various aspects of connectivity, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean and its European hinterland. All of the volumes are edited collections, each adopting a different unifying theme—the influence of Braudel, a single country as microcosm, the transfer of technology, change vs tradition, and the effects of boundaries and frontiers. Do any wider insights into connectivity in the past emerge? And where might archaeological studies of connectivity go next?

Corruption and crossroads

Concannon, Cavan & Mazurek, Lindsey A. (ed.). Across the Corrupting Sea: post-Braudelian approaches to the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. 2016. viii+254 pages, several b&w illustrations. Abingdon & New York: Routledge; 978-1-4724-5826-1 hardback £95.

Davison, David, Gaffney, Vince, Miracle, Preston & Sofaer, Jo (ed.). Croatia at the crossroads: a consideration of archaeological and historical connectivity. 2016. iv+264 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Oxford: Archaeopress; 978-1-78491-530-8 paperback £40.

Today the Mediterranean Sea is a boundary: the external frontier of the EU with North Africa and the Middle East. Each year, thousands of refugees and economic migrants risk their lives to cross its dangerous waters in search of a better life on its northern shores. But for archaeologists and historians, the ancient Mediterranean was a space of intensive interconnectivity, with distant places linked through shared cultural ideas and material culture; the sea was a medium to connect, not divide, those around its coast.

A good example is Across the Corrupting Sea: post-Braudelian approaches to the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Concannon and Mazurek. In defining ‘A new connectivity for the twenty-first century’, the editors start not by looking forward, but rather back to the work of Fernand Braudel. As we shall see with the other volumes under review, interest in Braudel and the Annales School is resurgent. What is it about Braudel's (1972) monumental work on Mediterranean history that has given it such influence on archaeologists? And why now? Concannon and Mazurek suggest that “in an age of constantly increasing connectivity, Braudel's systemic and scaled approaches to time and space resonate with contemporary models of actor-network theory, postcolonial experiences, spatial theory, and globalization” (p. 2).

Renewed interest in Braudel's work followed the 1972 English translation of his book, perhaps most convincingly deployed in Barker's (1995) A Mediterranean valley. But whereas Barker focused on the potential for understanding scales of time (longue durée, conjunctures, histoire événementielle), more recent followers have emphasised connectivity across space—perhaps linking, as the editors note, with ideas of globalisation and networks. Works such as Horden and Purcell's (2000) The Corrupting Sea and Broodbank's (2013) The making of the Middle Sea have burnished Braudel's reputation in the eyes of archaeologists. Nonetheless, his vision of the Mediterranean is not unproblematic, including its structuralist approach, environmental determinism and limited scope for human agency. Here, the editors nicely capture Braudel's work as “simultaneously paradigm-shifting and a dead-end” (p. 6), advancing what they call a ‘post-Braudelian’ approach that seeks to build on, rather than overturn, his legacy. Perhaps one of the key ideas that emerges here (and in several of the other books under review) is the argument for an explicit return to the local, recognising that “the global is an effect of the multitude of forces that coalesce, concatenate, and collapse at local, provisional sites” (p. 14).

Focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean, the volume's eight papers are grouped into three sections: ‘Cabotage and seascapes’, ‘Markets, connectivity, and the movement of religious texts’ and ‘Contesting the longue durée’. As with all the books under review, here there is only space to highlight a few of the individual papers. Ziskowski focuses on Corinth, a city that was renowned across the ancient Mediterranean as the source of innovations such as architectural terracottas, and as the producer of goods such as Geometric pottery. Ziskowski shows how most of these ideas and artefacts were borrowed from neighbouring communities, to the north, south, east and west, and adapted to define a distinctive Corinthian identity in order to differentiate the city from other Greek communities. Near Eastern decorative motifs, for example, were taken up decades before they appeared at other Greek sites, and were used to develop a characteristic Corinthian style that was recognisable across the Mediterranean. Ziskowski suggests that the elite played a crucial role in these developments by forging links with distant communities (an explanation taken up in some of the other volumes below). But why did Corinth, rather than any other Greek city, develop in this way? Ziskowski explicitly associates these developments with the geographic centrality of Corinth; despite all its obvious properties as a natural Mediterranean ‘crossroads’—sitting midway between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Levantine coast, astride the narrow isthmus separating the east-facing Saronic Gulf from the west-facing Gulf of Corinth—geography only afforded the possibility that this particular place would develop. Crossroads, after all, are simply a by-product of mobility between other places. Hence, we must ask: where did Corinth sit in the wider network? And why was its elite so savvy at exploiting the potential of their city's location? The need to convert potential connectivity into reality is a theme that emerges elsewhere in this and the other volumes under review.

The chapter by Caraher and Pettegrew on ‘Imperial surplus and local tastes: a comparative study of Mediterranean connectivity and trade’ also considers the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as another Mediterranean place often awarded the ‘crossroads’ epithet: Cyprus. The authors use surface survey data to demonstrate how human agents played a more significant role in Mediterranean history than Braudel's environmental determinism allows. For example, they are critical of the idea that the distributions and quantities of pottery documented by survey directly reflect broader economic or demographic trends; rather, they point to highly localised factors, such as specific construction projects (e.g. the Hexamilion, a 7.5km-long, 8m-high wall cutting off the Peloponnese from the north) and the ceramic tastes of particular communities. Indeed, it is these local considerations that explain the broader concept of connectivity and, especially, the idea that some places are inherently more ‘central’ than others. In relation to Corinth, they argue that

The seemingly enduring features of long-distance maritime ‘connectivity’ in the Corinthian landscapes, such as ancient canal cuts, ceramic goods, and the diolkos road, represent artifacts of historically contingent moments of exceptional interregional political, social and economic contact, rather than the timeless properties of an essentially connecting Isthmus (p. 174).

Another chapter also sets out explicitly to challenge Braudel, this time his vision of Dalmatia as “patriarchal, backward, and uncivilized” (p. 193). Dzino argues that Braudel's portrayal of the Eastern Adriatic littoral perpetuates an Orientalist discourse of the Balkans as ‘Other’ to the civilised West. In response, Dzino reconsiders the connectivity and dynamism of this region through the example of the Gorica sanctuary, located 30km inland from the coast. The architectural complex and its votive deposits lead Dzino to interpret the region as “a liminal space where global influences of La Tène and Mediterranean cultural and social templates were ‘glocalized’ within local indigenous cultural traditions” (p. 201). Similarly, Dzino considers sculptural representations of Silvanus and Diana to show how “Connectivity achieved through expanding social networks within the Roman Empire [allowed] local communities to negotiate their own Romanness and produce a new provincial culture” (p. 211). He argues that Dalmatia was in reality no different to any other Mediterranean region, drawing on global ideas and adapting them for local purposes.

Other papers in the collection pick up on key themes from Braudel's work, such as the role of cabotage and the emergence of capitalism, and offer interesting and useful case studies. But, a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean notwithstanding, the collection as a whole lacks the coherence of theme and method that might define a new (or post) paradigm of Mediterranean connectivity.

The final chapter of the collection, Dzino on Dalmatia, neatly segues to the next volume: Croatia at the crossroads: a consideration of archaeological and historical connectivity, edited by Davison, Gaffney, Miracle and Sofaer. This collection of 17 papers stems from a conference organised by the British-Croatian Society, to mark Croatia's accession to the EU in 2013 (the Preface notes the irony of the timing—no sooner does Croatia join than the UK votes to leave). The editors’ sparse, half-page Foreword explains that the papers are intended not simply to provide overviews of recent archaeological work, but also to explore the theme of “interconnectedness and forms of interaction including biological, cultural, religious, military, trade, craft and maritime relationships” (p. v). The papers then advance in chronological order from the Palaeolithic through to the nineteenth century AD, and thematically from stone tools to firearms.

Janković and Smith reconsider the evidence from Vindija Cave, the source of much of the genetic material used to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. They detail some of the archaeological problems of interpreting this site, but they hold out hope of a better understanding of Vindija as the wider picture of Neanderthal behaviour evolves; most of all, they stress the need for the redating of the site in order to set it firmly in its European context. The next two papers consider the development of Palaeolithic connectivity: Vujević demonstrates that shared typological and technological characteristics of stone tools in eastern Italy and coastal Croatia extend back to the Middle Palaeolithic; in contrast, Janković can trace back evidence of contact between the coastal and continental areas of Croatia only as far as the late Epigravettian.

Moving on in time, Tomas addresses Mycenaean seafaring along the Croatian coast. Given the widespread evidence for Mycenaean activity around the Eastern and Central Mediterranean generally—and the existence of earlier contacts between the Eastern Adriatic and the Aegean—it is a surprise to find no indication of Mycenaean material north of Albania: “Croatia was not at the crossroads of the early Greek seafarers” (p. 81). Several papers tackle the evidence for the mobility of people during the Roman period, using, for example, funerary monuments and the lead tags used by fullers and dyers to keep track of their clients’ garments. The evidence points to the presence of the Roman army and, more generally, the role of the state in facilitating connectivity and the mobility of people in the ancient Mediterranean.

Other papers consider the Neolithic and the Bronze and Iron Ages; the medieval period is represented by only a single contribution, concerning a sword that Milošević tentatively links with the ‘Arrival of the Croats at the end of the 8^th century’. A standout paper discusses ‘The Gnalić shipwreck: microcosm of the late Renaissance world’; Radić Rossi et al. report on renewed work on a late sixteenth-century wreck, first investigated in the 1960s and 1970s. The ship, the Gagliana Grossa, sank in 1583 en route from Venice to Constantinople laden with goods from around the Mediterranean and beyond, including linen shirts and rolls of damask beautifully preserved in a wooden chest. A selection of the extraordinary variety of finds is documented with sumptuous colour photographs (indeed, the volume is abundantly illustrated throughout). This paper is also an important reminder of the means of Mediterranean mobility (ships and boats) otherwise curiously all but absent in the volumes under review here, in spite of the discussion of cabotage and trade (although see Broodbank in Human mobility, below).

With no introductory or concluding papers to unite the individual chapters and their collective contribution, the volume nonetheless holds together well. As befits a volume marking Croatia's entry into the EU, the collection offers a ‘national’ perspective on the ‘international’. Although each chapter's interpretation of the theme of ‘interconnectedness’ is different, all of the papers set their material in wider context, demonstrating Croatia's long interconnectivity with the lands, and sea, around it. Whether the country can make any special claim to the status of a ‘crossroads’ is less certain. As noted above, the metaphor is too widely deployed—Corinth, Cyprus, Croatia, and no doubt Sicily, Malta and Crete—to be analytically meaningful. If everywhere is a crossroads, then nowhere is ‘central’ or ‘special’; everywhere is simply part of a network of connected places. Either way, this volume provides a welcome overview of Croatian archaeology and a thoroughly appropriate way to commemorate the country's accession to the EU. (Should we expect a volume, in mirror image, exploring the archaeological evidence for the UK's island status to mark the impending Brexit?)

Technological change and persistence practices

Kiriatzi, Evangelia & Knappett, Carl (ed.). Human mobility and technological transfer in the prehistoric Mediterranean. 2016. xvii+278 pages, 37 b&w illustrations, 2 tables. New York: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-107-14243-5 hardback $99.99.

Danielisová, Alžěbeta & Fernández-Götz, Manuel (ed.). Persistent economic ways of living: production, distribution, and consumption in late prehistory and early history (Archaeolingua Main Series 35). 2015. 241 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Budapest: Archaeolingua; 978-963-9911-70-3 hardback $60.

Casa, Philippe Della & Deschler-Erb, Eckhard (ed.). Rome's internal frontiers. Proceedings of the 2016 RAC session in Rome (Zurich Studies in Archaeology 11). 2016. 103 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Zurich: Chronos; 978-3-0340-1344-4 paperback €34.

The next volume, Human mobility and technological transfer in the prehistoric Mediterranean, edited by Kiriatzi and Knappett, tackles the concept of connectivity by focusing on the theme of technological transfer, or the mobility of knowledge about the making of ceramic, metal and glass artefacts. The papers are derived from a workshop held at the British School at Athens (BSA), and the collection marks the first of a new monograph series: ‘BSA Studies in Greek Antiquity’. The editors’ Introduction tackles ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, looking specifically to human geography for theoretical guidance. A key requirement is the ability to work between scales—the micro-scale of the individual, the meso-scale of the community and the macro-scale of ‘culture’—for example, connecting the day-to-day production of pots with the interregional convergence of ceramic styles. As well as human geography, the editors also turn to Braudel and the reinterpretation of his work by Horden and Purcell (2000), arguing for the Mediterranean as a place simultaneously fragmented and requiring connectivity and mobility for human survival. An important point here is the mobility of people and of the objects and ideas that moved with them. The editors rightly question neo-Darwinian models of cultural change based on biological or epidemiological ideas, where simple contact is sufficient to spread new ideas in a way akin to infectious diseases. Such models may explain the uptake of new objects (think schoolchildren and fidget spinners), but they are less well suited to the explanation of cultural change dependent on extended learning and apprenticeships, such as metal-working. Instead the editors, and their contributors, advocate more sophisticated approaches to the mobility of craft skills within social networks that underpin the transfer and translation of new technologies.

Following the Introduction is a masterful account of ‘The transmitting sea: a Mediterranean perspective’ by Broodbank. Just as metaphors such as ‘crossroads’ may become substitutes for explanation (above), the idea that the Mediterranean was an unusually connected space requires similar justification. Here, Broodbank makes that case for Mediterranean exceptionalism, from its fractal geography through to its unusual combinations of preservational environments. He also puts significant emphasis on the means of Mediterranean connectivity: sea-going vessels. Importantly, in terms of technological transfer, he notes that the adoption of one of the most important technological innovations facilitating mobility, the sail, took two millennia to spread from the Levant all the way to the far west. This neatly reinforces the point made by the editors that simple contact does not necessarily lead to adoption. Complex technologies require extended apprenticeships; they also require the capital and backing that only elites, or even states, can provide. Perhaps linked to this, Broodbank also makes the point about the importance of population and especially the need for a critical demographic mass to support and sustain the adoption of new technologies.

The case studies that follow include a clutch of papers on pottery technology: the role of competitive conspicuous consumption in the formation of stylistic variability in Late Neolithic Greece; the “establishment and maintenance of learning networks, as a component of intense interaction networks that shaped the Minoan world as we have come to know it” (p. 115); and the evidence for the role of travelling potters in the “spread of Mycenaean ways of doing things and the emergence of trans-regional styles, in parallel with local pottery traditions” (p. 152). Other featured technologies include metal-, stone- and glass-working. Georgakopoulou examines smelting sites for metal production in Bronze Age Greece and finds evidence for both the spread of new technological knowledge and the persistence of local differences in practice (in furnace design, for example); she suggests that this partial technological transfer might be explained by the importance of traditions and seasonal ritual behaviour at established sites. Bevan and Bloxam consider various stone-working skills across the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean and the social contexts within which technologies such as quarrying and construction were transmitted within and between cultural groups. Shortland reviews the evidence for Late Bronze Age glass-working in Greece, finding no evidence for local production from raw materials in the area; some technologies were clearly less mobile than others.

Kristiansen's chapter is rather different to the others, both in scope and its focus on the movement of people rather than technology. As would be expected, Kristiansen paints a broad canvas, stretching from Scandinavia to the Eastern Mediterranean, arguing for a Bronze Age “interconnected ‘globalised’ world without historical precedent” (p. 159) based on a shared elite value system that facilitated the mobility of traders, craftspeople, warriors and diplomats. Central places such as the Terramare settlements and Monkedonja were nodes in a network that linked the Mycenaean world with Temperate Europe (although despite the utility to his cause, Kristiansen rejects the controversial finds from Bernstorf; see review article by Harding and Brock-Hughes in this issue for a discussion of this site). He also directly links the large-scale abandonment of the Terramare settlements of the Po Valley c. 1200 BC—a total population of perhaps 150000—with the arrival of the ‘Sea Peoples’ in the Eastern Mediterranean: “the Terramare migration primarily was headed towards the Aegean and Crete” and the Terramare was the “major triggering force” (p. 178) for the events that destabilised the region.

The collection concludes with two comment papers. Blake offers ‘A view from the West’, that is, Bronze Age Italy. She offers examples of technology transfers that failed to ‘catch on’, such as glass production (the only known European production centre is at Frattesina) or, on the coast of Apulia, purple-dye processing and the use of the wheel for the production of Aegean-style pots: “technologies were introduced at select places but a condition of technological immobility prevailed” (p. 183). Blake suggests this might be explained through low population density and the active resistance of local potters: “technological transfers that stick and have the most impact come not from someone passing through briefly and moving on, but from a period of sustained interactions between willing tutors and learners” (p. 192). The latter was most likely to occur with some level of state involvement. The second comment paper is by Gosselain, whose work on potting traditions in West Africa is used by several of the contributors. He takes up the editors’ point that

connectivity is not an explanation in itself. It is just a prerequisite for the circulation of things, ideas and people [. . .] To use a hydraulic metaphor, we should avoid considering connectivity (or networks in general) as a system of pipes, through which water would automatically flow once a tap is opened (p. 194).

He uses examples of work from his own area of expertise on the historical period in West Africa to draw attention to the need for more thought about the agents involved in the mobility of technological knowledge and, in particular, about assumptions concerning the stability of meanings and functions as material culture moves from one group to another.

The volumes reviewed here are all collections of edited papers, but while most do not amount to more than the sum of their (nonetheless valuable) individual parts, Human mobility and technological transfer in the prehistoric Mediterranean is an exception. The strong Introduction, laying out an agenda with which the individual contributors have engaged, the cross-referencing between papers and the concluding comment papers make for a collection more cohesive than most.

So far, the volumes under review broadly link connectivity and mobility with change; hence it is the lack of change that demands explicit explanation (e.g. poor infrastructure, insufficient state authority, low population). Our next volume, edited by Danielisová and Fernández-Götz, reverses the equation, examining Persistent economic ways of living: production, distribution, and consumption in late prehistory and early history. Explicitly citing the model of Le Roy Ladurie's ‘timeless history’, the editors shift the explanatory burden. The “world of the common farmer” (p. 9), for example, persisted unchanged for centuries; if agricultural practices were effective, why would they change? From the perspective of the ‘neophile’ present, the investigation of persistent, or traditional, economic behaviour is a valuable endeavour.

The editors provide a short Introduction outlining the concept of ‘persistent economic ways of living’. Their nod towards Le Roy Ladurie and Braudel, both historians of the Annales School, suggests that the editors share intellectual inspiration with all of the previous volumes, emphasising, for example, the social embeddedness of economic structures. Here, however, the emphasis is as much on how social hierarchy hampers, as well as promotes, the spread of innovations, in relation to the production of food, the exploitation of key resources and specialised manufacturing. They also suggest that their approach will encourage archaeologists to look beyond their sub-disciplinary silos and to adopt longer-term, broader-scale perspectives. Yet, the papers deal with the Iron Age and the Early Medieval periods, and

are chronologically separated by the Roman Era and the Great Migration period which are believed to disrupt the traditional schemes of the structuring/organising of societies and socio-cultural principles. But the traditional systems and principles are maintained over a long time even when interrupted by periods of different organisation of social and political life (p. 11).

Even assuming that it is true that Iron Age traditions continued ‘below the radar’ during the Roman period only to reappear in medieval times, for an approach that seeks to identify and explain persistent economic behaviour, the rationale for punching a big chronological hole through the middle of the collection needed to be made more strongly. Admittedly, not all of the case studies are located within the former limits of the Roman Empire, and there is thus no ‘gap’ between Iron Age and medieval to bridge; yet it is nonetheless an intentional gap and presumably therefore serves some meaningful purpose.

Chronological questions aside, the book's 15 papers are divided into four ‘chapters’ (sections): ‘Approaching ancient economies’, ‘Managing raw materials’, ‘Landscapes and subsistence strategies’ and ‘Technology production and consumption’. The first section contains the Introduction, plus two further chapters on theoretical modelling. The second section offers four diverse chapters on the management of raw materials. These include an agent-based model of prehistoric salt mining at Hallstatt (Kowarik et al.) and a detailed report on a fascinating ‘proto-industrial’ salt-production site in the Seille Valley, France (Olivier). The latter is an interesting inclusion within a volume about persistent behaviour, as the site appears to have only operated from the last quarter of the seventh century to the end of the sixth century BC. The presence of women's jewellery, including bracelets made of shale or lignite, plus ethnographic parallels, lead Olivier to suggest a sexual division of labour: women carrying brine and men tending the furnaces. Intriguingly, Olivier believes the women to have been of some status; indeed, perhaps owing their wealth and status to salt-working. Also in this section, Gassmann and Wieland report on one of the oldest iron-production centres of Central Europe, near Neuebürg in the Black Forest. Investigations of dozens of slag heaps identified around an Early La Tène hillfort of sixth-/fifth-century BC date have revealed furnaces indicating “pre-industrial mass production” (p. 96) at levels far in excess of local demand (continuing the ‘crossroads’ theme from earlier, the authors suggest production developed at this location, as “The North Black Forest is situated very centrally in the Early Celtic World” (p. 96)).

The third section turns to subsistence strategies. Danielisová uses a modelling technique to assess the scale of agricultural production at an Iron Age site in Central Europe, demonstrating the sort of surplus that would have been necessary before the risk of shortage was sufficiently reduced to allow producers to consider entering the market. This paper links more directly than most with the concept of economic persistence and the barriers to changing economic behaviours outlined in the Introduction (although, returning to the chronological ‘gap’, there has been comparable work on Roman Mediterranean landscapes that could have been usefully cited here alongside that on the prehistoric and medieval periods). The paper by Torres-Martínez offers a different take on persistence; he documents the significant economic and technological developments in Late Iron Age Cantabria, including new crops, new methods of metal- and craft-working and new wheel-produced pottery fired using new kiln technology. Hence, the Late Iron Age was a time of significant transformation (perhaps linked to climate change), but it is only in closing that the author notes that “Most technological changes taking place at this time, in particular those linked to rural life, survived without major changes for another two thousand years” (p. 128). With regard to the volume's theme of persistence, it is arguably these two millennia of continuity that demand attention rather than the rapid transformation of the Iron Age.

Also in this section, Malrain et al. use the results of developer-led archaeology to examine Late Iron Age settlement in France, drawing on a database of over 700 sites. They identify varied ‘rhythms’ of settlement foundation, occupation and abandonment, with two distinct phases of growth (followed by decline) in settlement numbers: the second half of the sixth century BC and (a larger one) the mid second century BC. These results are then integrated with details of pollen, animal bone and archaeobotanical material and regional differences identified; Brittany, especially, seems to follow its own particular course. Notably, shorter-lived sites seem to be associated with extensive cereal production, but longer-lived sites are linked with intensification; might this suggest that sites with the most traditional agricultural practices were the least ‘persistent’?

The final section turns to ‘Technology production and consumption’. Tappert examines Early La Tène pottery production, and predominantly the adoption of the potter's wheel in Bavaria, Bohemia and Austria under influence from the Late Hallstatt ‘princely’ groups of south-western Germany and eastern France. Reflecting some of the papers in Human mobility (above), Tappert concludes that the new technology was not taken up uniformly, but rather each workshop adapted the techniques in a different way; one explanation offered is the idea of migrant potters, bringing their knowledge and equipment with them (traditional hand-made pottery production continued throughout for domestic use). Thér et al. also address the adoption of the wheel for La Tène pottery production in Bohemia. They identify a notable change between La Tène A and B, with a shift to techniques requiring significantly less time to master, which the authors argue reflects reduced elite control over pottery production. In sum, this volume offers a mixed bag. It promises an alternative perspective on connectivity and the mobility of ideas by examining the concept of persistence and tradition, but some chapters (although certainly not all) focus more on change than continuity, and only a handful speak directly to the editors’ stated agenda.

Finally, we turn to another neglected aspect of connectivity and globalisation: boundaries and frontiers. Recently, the Roman Empire has been seen as a model or precursor of globalisation. Within its well-defined external frontiers, culture, economy and politics came to define an integrated society—a huge community connected by roads, language, material culture and a love of fish sauce; differences were articulated in opposition to barbarians beyond the edges of the Roman world. In his Introduction to Rome's internal frontiers, edited by Della Casa and Deschler-Erb, however, Deschler-Erb directs our attention to Rome's internal frontiers—between provinces and administrative districts, and the empire's tax and customs borders. He stresses that although terms such as Romano-British and Gallo-Roman are widely used, these are modern concepts; did the inhabitants of provinces share provincial identities, neatly bounded by administrative borders? And how might these be recognised archaeologically? These specific questions are perhaps of broader interest than they appear, for they resonate with wider issues of how identity can and cannot be read from the archaeological record.

The volume's ten papers, nicely laid out and smartly illustrated with some very slick graphics, many in colour, fall into four approaches: written sources and epigraphy, landscape and spatial analysis, finds analysis, and archaeobotanical and archaeozoological insights (the latter represented by a single provisional paper). Hoss begins by examining variations in the production techniques and designs of widely shared types of Roman material culture such as brooches. She questions the idea that there were distinct provincial cultures, identifying, instead, localised (sub-provincial) distributions of objects or, conversely, (supra-provincial) distributions encompassing several provinces. These results are broadly reflected by most of the following papers. These contributions also narrow down to focus on a single inter-provincial border, that between Germania Superior and Raetia; indeed, eight out of the volume's ten chapters concern this border. Strikingly, this Roman boundary has no political or cultural significance today, the line running through the territory of three modern nation states: south through Baden-Württemberg in Germany, into north-western Switzerland and then into the French department of Doubs. The very lack of any enduring legacy, material or otherwise, is presumably part of the motivation for researching this former frontier.

Heising examines the provincial border between the two provinces using different classes of ceramics, finding that southern Germania Superior was more closely linked to neighbouring Raetia, to the east, than to the rest of Germania Superior to the north. This ‘cultural frontier’ appears to have been more important than the administrative border. Meanwhile, Blasinger and Grabherr consider whether brooches, as indicators of costume, can be used to identify the boundary; they find a blurring of artefact distributions around the border area, which they argue reflects the intersection between two much larger Gallic and Danubian distribution areas. Again, the actual border line seems elusive. Other investigations using coins, pottery and settlement patterns are similarly unable to identify any distinctive breaks in distribution that might indicate the effects of this inter-provincial boundary. Melko, however, comes to different conclusions; by focusing on very specific aspects of ceramic production, she is able to identify the possible presence and effects of the tax border on the distribution of ceramics. She highlights two types of conical bowl that look almost identical but which were produced using very different techniques requiring very different skills and learning processes. One of these types has a restricted distribution, coinciding with the provincial boundary. Melko argues that this may reflect the effects of the tax border; a lack of trade across the boundary may have led to the technological separation of one group of producers who continued to make a bowl similar in appearance, developing their own distinctive production technique. Although only one example, this brings the ideas of connectivity and technological mobility full circle: the effects of frontiers on the creation of difference. If the provincial border between Germania Superior and Raetia is anything to go by, Rome's internal frontiers were much less significant, culturally and economically, than its external frontiers. Indeed, the papers in this collection raise interesting questions about the intended purpose and practical function of provincial boundaries. As today, official borders may have mapped rather poorly onto the reality of people's lives.

Summing up these recent volumes on connectivity, it is clear that contemporary mobility and globalisation exert significant influence over interpretations of the past. It will be interesting to see the extent to which geopolitical shifts—the Mediterranean as frontier, the inward turn of the USA and China's Belt and Road Initiative—reshape future archaeological research. Will the ancient Mediterranean become a less integrated and more contested space? Will Mediterranean maritime connectivity be replaced by a new focus on the interconnectedness of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean as China seeks historical precedents for a new narrative of globalisation? Antiquity will endeavour to keep its readers informed!