New Books in Archaeology

"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referred to as ‘Roman playwrights,’ and Rome itself is generally regarded as the driving force behind the development of theatrical culture in Italy. But was this early theatre in Italy specifically or characteristically Roman? Using previously marginalised archaeological source material and placing it in constructive dialogue with the surviving ancient literature, A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a significant reinterpretation of how theatre developed in the Italian peninsula, as well as a radical reappraisal of the role of Republican Rome as the impetus for cultural change. Challenging a long-held scholarly consensus, it is argued that whilst Rome would eventually rise to political and cultural dominance, the archaeological evidence does not encourage us to view Rome as a significant factor in the development of theatre in Italy until at least the end of the first century BCE and the construction of the Theatre of Pompey. Our attention is directed instead to other cities in the Italian peninsula during the third and second centuries BCE, which have hitherto been greatly overshadowed by imperialistic narratives of Roman cultural development. Jessica Clarke is a historian and archaeologist specialising in ancient Roman theatre and entertainment culture. She was awarded her PhD by University College London in 2024. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton UP, 2025) unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.  Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world. Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world. But what if that history is wrong? In The Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury, 2025), archeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers. A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies. Mike Pitts is a writer and broadcaster, archaeologist and former museum curator. His books include A Fairweather Eden: Excavations at Boxgrove, Hengeworld, Digging for Richard III, Digging up Britain, and How to Build Stonehenge. He has also written for almost all of the important British newspapers - the Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Scientist, BBC History Magazine, Spectator and other papers and magazines - and conduct original research and publish in peer-reviewed journals. He also edited British Archaeology magazine for 20 years and is a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.In this stunning work of art history, Dr. Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications—as modern as they were believed to be medieval—moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly skilled craftspeople to meet the demands of Western collectors. Shifting away from the moralizing stance of past studies on reconstructed Islamic ceramics, Dr. Graves shows how fabrication and forgery became a major site of participation in modern global capitalism and establishes an entirely new paradigm in the history of art.Drawing on a substantive new body of provenance research, archaeology, economic history, and laboratory analysis, Invisible Hands centers previously marginalized objects, reframing the practices of fabrication and forgery as crucial forms of invention and artistic skill worthy of study and admiration. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion and Maritime Connections (Routledge, 2026) assesses the impact of European colonization in the late 19th and early 20th century in ‘restructuring’ the shared past of India and Southeast Asia. It provides case studies that transcend colonial constructs and adopt newer approaches to understanding the shared past. The authors explore these developments through the lens of political figures like Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and re-examine themes such as the Greater India Society (1926–1959) established in Calcutta, and the role of Buddhism in post-World War II connections, as the repatriation of the mortal remains of Japanese soldiers killed in Burma (Myanmar) acquired urgency. Drawing on a diverse range of sources including archaeology, Buddhist texts, the afterlives of the Hindu temples, maritime networks, and inscriptions from Vietnam and central India, the book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Buddhism, archaeology, heritage studies, cultural studies, and political history as well as South and Southeast Asian history. Guest: Himanshu Prabha Ray Interviewer: Natali Pearson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange.In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of how a landscape of ancient mounds and ruins became an archaeological site, brings to light the network of actors who made it happen, and reveals the Indigenous histories silenced in the process. By drawing on the insights of Indigenous Totonac peoples who have lived and worked in El Tajín for more than a century, Sam Holley-Kline explores historical processes that made both the archaeological site and regional historical memory. In the Shadow of El Tajín decenters discussions of the state and tourism industry by focusing on the industries and workers who are integral to the functioning of the site but who have historically been overlooked by studies of the ancient past. Holley-Kline recovers local Indigenous histories in dialogue with broader trends in scholarship to demonstrate the rich recent past of El Tajín, a place better known for its ancient history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

For as long as cats have coexisted with humans, they have been feared, revered and respected. They appear as dynamic hunters in Palaeolithic carvings and cave paintings; were venerated as gods in ancient Egypt; and still have the power to fascinate and frighten us, as the popularity of Joe Exotic, the self-styled Tiger King, shows. How did we go from hunting, and being hunted by, cats to keeping them as pets in our homes? In Cat Tales: A History (Thames & Hudson, 2025), Dr. Jerry Moore presents a wide-ranging and captivating history, charting cats’ journey from the African plains of the Pleistocene through the first human settlements in the Near East and on to ships setting sail for the Americas. What emerges is a complex picture of mutual domestication: cats chose to live with us as much as we chose to live with them, and as our growing cities bring the world’s wild cats into closer contact with humans, we must learn new ways to live together. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

This important new work, Buddhist Landscapes: Art and Archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th Centuries (NUS Press, 2023) by Stephen Murphy, build on extensive fieldwork and archaeological surveys to reveal the Khorat Plateau as having a distinctive Buddhist culture, including new forms of art and architecture, and a characteristic aesthetic. By combining archaeological and art historical analysis with an historical ecology approach, Murphy traces the outlines of Buddhism’s spread into the region, along its major river systems. In this episode, hosted by Natali Pearson, Murphy shows how he has read this history into and against the Khorat landscape, attending to the emergence of monumental architecture such as stūpa, and Buddha images carved into the rockfaces of hills and mountainsides, and the importance on the Khorat Plateau of the use of boundary markers, or sīmā. This book provides a new picture of the region in the first and early second millennia, adding to our understanding of the development of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and offering a new basis for other regionally-focused scholarship to thrive —from textual Buddhology to history to anthropology. As Murphy explains, this opens up new possibilities for understanding the early spread of Buddhism within different landscapes across Asia. Dr Stephen A. Murphy specialises in the art and archaeology of early Buddhism and Hinduism in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Malaysia. He is the Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art, and Chair of the Centre of South East Asian Studies, at SOAS University of London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

In September 2025 the Dutch government announced that it would return to Indonesia the fossilized remains of the famous ‘Java Man’, the first known example of an early species of human, homo erectus. The remains had been uncovered by a Dutch archaeologist in 1891-2 during the colonial period and taken to the Netherlands. In fact, Southeast Asia has a special place in the history of human evolution. Charles Higham’s Early Southeast Asia: From the First Humans to the First Civilizations (River Books and NUS Press, 2025), covers almost two million years of history, from the appearance of the first human species to the flourishing of the civilisation of Angkor. Recent discoveries and new dating technologies are revealing remarkable new insights into the region’s early history. We are coming to a much better understanding of the chronology of human settlement in Southeast Asia, the development of socially stratified societies, urbanization, the expansion of overseas trade, and the rise of the first states. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years. Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites. In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas. To learn more about Steeves’ research, please visit The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas at https://tipdba.com/. This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various sites and cities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri explores how Ashoka's visibility from antiquity to the modern era has been accompanied by a reinvention of his persona. Although the historical Ashoka spoke expansively of his ideas of governance and a new kind of morality, his afterlife is a jumble of stories and representations within various Buddhist imaginings. By remembering Ashoka selectively, Lahiri argues, ancient kings and chroniclers created an artifice, constantly appropriating and then remolding history to suit their own social visions, political agendas, and moral purposes. Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. Her previous books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered; Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories; and Ashoka in Ancient India, which was awarded the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2016. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

The story of the lands between the Forth and Humber from the end of the Roman period to the Viking kingdom of York is one of the most richly fascinating in British history. This the age of Lindisfarne and of Bede; of the dramatic hills, valleys and ancient routeways that link the Irish Sea and the North Sea; of names that resonate even now: Edwin, Oswald, Hild, Cuthbert, Wilfrid; of conquest, conversion and the legacies of intellectual giants. Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field (Birlinn, 2025) by Max Adams and Colm O’Brien is a history of Early Medieval Northumbria that explores themes of landscape, power, creativity and intellect. Fresh archaeological evidence and research in historical geography shed light on the fascinating story of how land was managed, exploited and deployed as an expression of power by both secular and ecclesiastical forces, and aspects such as the role of élite women in shaping politics and religion is given new focus. Dr. Adams and Dr. O’ Brien show conclusively how Northumbria’s political, cultural and religious elements coalesced to forge a creative powerhouse which shaped the world we have inherited. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna Letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt’s pharaohs. A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna Letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today’s. Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision of a new colony in the territory: a French Levant. But what transpired for the French state in the Levant after World War I, and why does that ill-conceived venture still matter today? Resurrecting the Past investigates how heritage politics led to a new form of empire—a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon—and with it a tide of regional and international critique. Against such opposition, the heritage mandate leaned heavily on spectacle and science, generating a sprawling set of sites and objects—Ottoman mansions, crusader castles, Umayyad mosques, Roman arches, buried synagogues, and Sumerian ziggurats. As Dr. Griswold traces how French heritage efforts cycled through multiple ideal pasts in the Levant from 1918 to 1946, she reveals how each one, though grounded in realities, also complicated those constructs and the work of French heritage-makers. Resurrecting the Past offers a parable of how efforts in heritage politics aimed to construct a union of ideologies and objects deemed the best past for France's uncertain future but struggled as much as they succeeded. Eventually those same heritage politics ironically helped officials justify the end of the "French Levant." This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton UP, 2025) by Professor John Blair provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, Dr. Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

In Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future (University of Arizona Press, 2025), archaeologist Joe E. Watkins provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition. Relaying the deep history of the islands of Japan, Watkins tells the archaeological story from the earliest arrivals some 40,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago when local cultures began utilizing pottery and stone tools. About 2,300 years ago, another group of people immigrated from the Korean peninsula into the Japanese archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture with them. They intermarried with the people who were there, forming the basis of the contemporary Japanese majority culture. As the Japanese state developed on the central Islands of Honshu, Ryukyu, and Shikoku, the people of Hokkaido continued developing along a different trajectory with minimal interaction with the mainland until colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, when the people known as the Ainu came under Japanese governmental policy. Watkins's insightful analysis highlights the Ainu's enduring spirit and their resurgence as part of the global Indigenous movement. Key events such as the 1997 Nibutani Dam case and the 2007 recognition of the Ainu as Japan's Indigenous people are explored in depth, showcasing the Ainu's ongoing fight for cultural preservation and self-determination. By situating the Ainu's experiences within broader global colonial histories, Indigenizing Japan underscores the shared struggles and resilience of Indigenous communities worldwide. Joe E. Watkins is a senior consultant for Archaeological and Cultural Education Consultants (ACE Consultants), based in Tucson, Arizona. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology's relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their origins remain the subject of heated debate. Were they composed in a single era or over the course of centuries? Were they crafted by one or by many poets? Do they reflect historical reality? These and other important questions are answered in this book. Michael Cosmopoulos, in The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Epic Greek Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2025), reconstructs the world of the Homeric poems and explores the interplay between poetry, social memory, and material culture. By integrating key insights from archaeology, philology, anthropology, and oral tradition, he offers a nuanced perspective of the emergence and early development of Greek epic. His wide-canvas approach enables readers to appreciate the complexity of the Homeric world and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate factors that shaped these magnificent poems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, while in Greece and Macedonia a fragile balance of power repeatedly dissolved into war. Then, from the late third century BCE to the end of the first, Rome’s military and diplomatic might successively dismantled these post-Alexandrian political structures, one by one. During the Hellenistic period (c. 323–30 BCE), small polities struggled to retain the illusion of their identity and independence, in the face of violent antagonism among large states. With time, trade growth resumed and centers of intellectual and artistic achievement sprang up across a vast network, from Italy to Afghanistan and Russia to Ethiopia. But the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close—or so the story goes. In Angelos Chaniotis’s view, however, the Hellenistic world continued to Hadrian’s death in 138 CE. Not only did Hellenistic social structures survive the coming of Rome, Chaniotis shows, but social, economic, and cultural trends that were set in motion between the deaths of Alexander and Cleopatra intensified during this extended period. Age of Conquests provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient civilization during five crucial centuries. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530BC, the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world’s first museum. Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moudhy Al-Rashid’s book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton / Hodder, 2025) which dives into the many different aspects of life and society across the many states that governed Mesopotamia. Moudhy Al-Rashid is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specializes in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Between Two Rivers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

What can a map do, beyond showing us where things are? Michelle Wang's new book, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (U Chicago Press, 2023), explores this question through images painted on bronze, wood, and silk that were buried in tombs between the fourth and second centuries BCE. Wang encourages readers to look at these images as terrestrial diagrams — pictures that didn’t just represent the world, but made worlds. These tools helped the living connect with the dead, linked earthly and cosmic orders, and imagined what the afterlife might look like. Each of the four chapters brings the reader into a different tomb site with different diagrams, including the plan for the grand tomb of King Cuo (who died circa 313 BCE), diagrams in the tomb of a low-level government functionary, and silk drawings from the Mawangdui tombs. Some helped guide descendants through ritual spaces, others recreated bureaucratic systems, and still others laid out auspicious spaces for eternal protection. Throughout, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams asks questions that reach beyond early China: What makes something a map, or a work of art? When does a picture move from showing the world to shaping it? This book will appeal to readers interested in art history, archaeology, and early Chinese thought, as well as anyone curious about how images can shape our understanding of the world Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology