Book Review

At first glance, the title of the volume is a bit misleading: "Antiquity" not only means the period in history, but also the name of a highly regarded journal founded in 1927. Due to its seventy-fifth anniversary, the new series "Antiquity Papers" intends to re-publish some of the journal's most challenging and outstanding articles. Each volume is dedicated to a special topic (at least four further volumes are forthcoming). Simon Stoddart has selected twenty-four important articles on "landscape" that date from 1928 up to 1999. Not every article concerns pre-historical or antique landscapes: Frederick Barker's instructive article, for instance, is a study on the production, preservation and consumption of the Berlin Wall.	1
The volume is divided into eight sections, each introduced by the editor. In these introductions the specific path-breaking function of the articles is emphasized and related to modern studies, whereas the historical articles themselves remain without any additions or comments. Due to the limited space it is not possible to focus on single articles in detail, but only on the eight groups. The first section, entitled "early studies of landscapes," provides some good examples about the beginnings of landscape archaeology in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Three articles concern the British Isles, one the prehistoric cart-tracks in Malta. The second section is dedicated to the "impact of aerial photography." Putting together a series of four articles dating from 1929 to 1976, one can get a vivid impression of the rising importance of this method. The third section, however, tries to present new methodological approaches, among them using GIS for exploring ditches as consciously erected buildings in the landscape to determine social space.	2
The other sections put together various case studies. Section four focuses on "integrated landscape archaeology." The examples are taken from Wessex (Avebury, Stonehenge), from the Fens, and from Italy. The section called "physical landscapes" refers to a more geological approach, but nevertheless it provides a number of important results for historians—for instance, about the genesis of Holocene landscapes. These articles show how important interdisciplinarity is for anyone interested in environmental history. The sections on "industrial landscapes" and "contested landscapes" contain case studies taken from modern history: about railway bridges and early industrial settlements, about the Berlin Wall, and about the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. The last section is dedicated to "experienced landscapes," asking for the perception of places of power in pre-historical Ireland and in the woodland landscapes of Wisconsin.	3
To sum up: The new "Antiquity Papers" series does not only re-print older outstanding articles. With commentary from Simon Stoddart, the collection becomes a new and useful survey on seventy-five years of research, dedicated to a new generation of scholars examining new fields of research like landscape history. The volume on environmental history is an excellent beginning, indeed.	4
Reviewed by Christian Rohr, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at the University of Salzburg (Austria). He is working on the environmental history of the Early and Late Middle Ages, in particular on natural disasters and their perceptions.

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