Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Archaeology of Roman Macedonia: Urban and Rural Environments By Vassilis Evangelidis. Oxford: Oxbow 2022. Pp. 224. $59.99. ISBN 9781789258011 (paperback).Michalis KarambinisMichalis KarambinisNational Hellenic Research Foundation. Athens, Greece Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the introduction of this volume, Dimitris Grigoropoulos notes that “the present book provides the first comprehensive work on the archaeology of Roman Macedonia” (xvi). Indeed, with the exception of the historical study by F. Papazoglou, Les villes de Macédoine à l’époque romaine (BCH Suppl. 16, École française d’Athènes 1988), there is no other book, to my knowledge, that discusses Roman Macedonia in an overall manner. Grigoropoulos explains the reasons for this gap: linguistic divides, different academic traditions, lack of collaboration, and spurious nationalistic politics of the modern states that today share the territory of Roman Macedonia. To these we might add the difficult task of coping with an entire province (xv). With these considerations in mind, the present monograph is more than welcome.The result is not without problems, though. The geographical boundaries of the study, first of all, are not clearly defined. In the introduction, it is explicitly stated that “this book sets out to explore the Roman province of Macedonia” (xv), but the author essentially focuses on the heart of the province—that is, the lands of the Argeadic, Temenid, and later Antigonid kingdom. These lands correspond to Lower and Upper Macedonia, the area of Amphaxitis (between the Axios River and Mount Vertiskos) and the area of Parastrymonia (between the Mount Vertiskos and the Nestos River, which delineated the eastern boundary of the province). In modern terms, these lands cover much of northern Greece, a large part of North Macedonia, and a chunk of southwest Bulgaria (13). The Roman province of Macedonia, on the other hand, included a considerable portion of modern Albania, and sometime between the creation of the province of Achaia (27 BCE) and the second century CE incorporated Thessaly as well. These two large geographical areas are missing from Evangelidis’ discussions. Additionally, the author mentions few sites outside the territory of modern Greece in comparison to those within it. Thus, it seems that the study area of this book is basically northern modern Greece, including even Aegean Thrace, although that area was not part of the Roman province of Macedonia, at least after the creation of the province of Thrace in the mid first century CE.The chronological boundaries of the book are better defined: in his foreword, Evangelidis states that the period under examination is from the time of the conquest of Macedonia by the Romans (168 BCE) until the early fourth century CE. The author separates this time span into two subperiods: Late Hellenistic–Early Imperial (mid second century BCE–end of the first century CE) and Middle Roman (end of the first century CE–beginning of the fourth century CE) (xi–xii). The discussion is consistent with this statement, but the chronological boundary that the author has chosen to conclude his study creates some problems. This is particularly striking in the case of the palace of Galerius in Thessaloniki (early fourth century CE), which he presents under the title “A Late Roman Administrative and Ritual Complex” (ch. 7.1). The heading implies that the author correctly conceives the building complex as part of a different period from that which he examines, and for which no other evidence is provided in the book apart from the palace. Moreover, the discussion on the palace complex of Galerius in Thessaloniki cannot be done in isolation—that is, without taking into account other examples from the epoch, such as the palace of Diocletian in Split, or of Constantine in Trier.Despite these issues, the book constitutes a good panorama of the built environment of Roman Macedonia. The author knows very well the area under examination and the literature for the matters that he deals with; actually, this book is the result of his already extensive study on the architecture of Roman Greece. In the present book, Evangelidis examines the urban and rural landscapes of the region and all types of built environments: agoras and fora, public and administrative edifices, structures for commerce and industry, temples and sanctuaries, spectacle buildings, aqueducts and baths, streets and gates, houses, villas, shops, fortifications, and cemeteries.The first part of the book is a historical and geographical background; the second is the apparatus of all types of buildings and structures; and the third part provides the author’s reading of the archaeological evidence. All these are presented in concise, dense, and careful text, accompanied by black-and-white images and illuminating drawings and maps made by the author.The reader must be armed with a lot of patience to read the 130 pages of the second part (of the 200 or so of the whole book). This is basically a typological presentation of the buildings, with a focus on matters of continuity and change. The author pinpoints elements of Classical–Hellenistic tradition and of Roman innovation in the constructions under investigation. In his overall discussion in the third part, Evangelidis discerns that “from the late Hellenistic to the end of the first century CE the materials and types were mostly Hellenistic in character” (176), while from the mid second century CE onward “this Hellenistic tradition started to give its place to fast-growing empire-wide architecture represented by a wide range of built features” (178). Almost all cities, according to him, were embellished and monumentalized. Moreover, some cities (e.g., Thasos) maintained their preexisting layout of public spaces, adopting some new types of buildings that joined older renovated ones. Some others (e.g., Philippi, Dion) presented a radically new urban landscape. A common element was standardization concerning the location of the new features, which consequently led to uniformity.Comparing Macedonia with southern Greece, the author distinguishes divergences in the tradition of urban life and built environment. According to him, Macedonia had a lower degree of pre-Roman urbanization, and there did not exist “any very widely diffused monumental urban architecture before the imperial period” (194). This led supposedly underdeveloped towns to be more receptive to new architectural models, which consequently caused the footprint of “Roman (empire-wide-contemporary)” architecture to be more visible in Macedonia than in southern Greece (194). This suggestion is plausible, and we could accept it for Upper Macedonia, where population was mainly organized in tribes, with very few urban centers; and indeed, the bulk of pre-Roman cities were concentrated in southern Greece. However, the 112 classical poleis in the Copenhagen Polis Center Inventory for Macedonia (M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, eds., An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, Oxford University Press 2004, 794–869) are not exactly what one should expect to find in an area with a low pre-Roman urbanization rate. The aforementioned thinking seems to me to be a comparison between something that we know (the lavish and plentiful building activity of Roman Macedonia) with something that we do not know (the urban layout of Classical–Hellenistic Macedonia).A similar phenomenon of “visible” Roman and “invisible” Hellenistic architecture we encounter on Crete, an island that in the Classical–Early Hellenistic period had about 50 poleis. Meticulous archaeological investigation there has started gradually to reveal Hellenistic monuments and thus to moderate the sharp contrast between the pre-Roman and Roman archaeological record. Both Crete and Macedonia were regions that in Imperial times have been found in cardinal geographical locations: the first along the sea routes between Italy and Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, and the latter along the land route between Italy and Asia Minor. This enabled the cities of these regions to get involved in the pan-Mediterranean trade network, to accumulate wealth, and to follow the economic and cultural developments of the empire, among them the construction of new types of buildings. The building boom (or adoption of a new architectural typology) in Macedonia should not necessarily be explained by a lack of pre-Roman monumental activity in the area. This is manifestly shown in western Asia Minor, where building activity in the Hellenistic period was more than plentiful; yet in Roman Imperial times the area saw equally tremendous architectural programs (see R. Willet, The Geography of Urbanism in Roman Asia Minor, Equinox 2020, 203–49). Evangelidis dedicated just three pages to putting Macedonia in wider perspective (ch. 20), and in this he mainly compared Macedonia with southern Greece. This is not enough; at least Asia Minor should have been included in the discussion.Was this book needed? Macedonia concentrates plentiful archaeological material from the Roman period, but it has not received the same level of research as other provinces. The author undoubtedly dedicated many working hours to gathering all the evidence for the built environment of the area, scattered mostly in Greek publications and thus difficult for the international public to access. Moreover, he offered useful and detailed remarks on the architecture of the region, and most importantly, having created the “big picture,” facilitated the comparison with other provinces. Thus, the answer to the question above must be affirmative. Besides, as Grigoropoulos notes in the introduction, “This book is hardly the final word on the subject” (xvi) but rather functions as a starting point for further elaboration and questioning.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 127, Number 2April 2023 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 76Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724482 Views: 76Total views on this site HistoryPublished online February 07, 2023 Copyright © 2023 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.