The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy by Christer Bruun Jonathan Edmondson

224 PHOENIX attempt to investigate the possible link between cultural practices and age, gender, social status, or identity. I found the discussion in the conclusion particularly interesting, as the author weaves together all the data in order to present the world of the living through the remnants from the world of the dead. Burial practices—strongly influenced by Greek culture— suggest that the population of Kamarina was closely associated with other Sicilian Greek populations. It was a polis where people of diverse ethnicities and ancestries were united in both life and death by a shared culture. The addition of biological data helps to complete the portrait of Kamarineans: the demographic profile of the population (high number of young adult individuals) and specific pathological conditions (e.g., cranial trauma) suggest that the people of Kamarina were subject to turbulent living conditions marked by instability, wars, and epidemic outbreaks. Throughout the book the movement in and across different scientific boundaries works to strengthen the arguments presented. Overall, the book accomplishes its objectives since it successfully integrates different aspects of the world of the dead: the testimonies of written sources, material culture, funerary rituals, and the scientific study of human skeletal remains. Such a vivid and well-documented analysis can serve as a solid background for future work on classical populations and especially on those of the diaspora. Few publications succeed in achieving a true bioarchaeological analysis, but this book, discussing life and death at the site of Kamarina and bridging the gap between classical archaeology and biological anthropology, definitively does. It should therefore be considered an excellent resource for students, researchers, and professionals alike, and a significant contribution to the bioarchaeology of the classical world. Universit e de Fribourg Chryssi Bourbou The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy. Edited by Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xxxvii, 888. Why do inscriptions matter? Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson have produced an excellent and wide-ranging introduction to inscriptions in the Roman world that answers this question in many different ways and is accessible to more than just those who already work with epigraphy. The editors make clear in their preface that the volume includes inscriptions in more than just the Latin language (hence the word “Roman” rather than “Latin” in the title), and that it is aimed at an audience wider than that of practicing epigraphists in order to convey the contributions of inscriptions to the study of the Roman world as broadly as possible, both to scholars and to students of antiquity. In this they have been successful. For although there are technical chapters that focus specifically on the work, in Latin, of the epigraphist or the linguist, most of the chapters take as their focus a variety of important historical topics, range all over the Roman world, and engage with writing on stone in not only Latin and Greek, but also Etruscan, Oscan, Celtiberian, Punic, and even an Indo-European language not yet identified (699). The book is divided into three parts: “Roman Epigraphy: Epigraphic Methods and History of the Discipline,” “Inscriptions in the Roman World,” and “The Value of Inscriptions for Reconstructing the Roman World.” The first and second together consist BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 225 of eight chapters covering how to work with the physical object and publish an inscription; what manuscripts can contribute to the study of inscriptions; forgeries and fakes (featuring a number of imaginative and patriotic rogues); the history of the major corpora; digital resources (a useful piece that stretches out to cover Greek inscriptions as well); a typology of Latin inscriptions; layout, tools, and carving. The final chapter of these two sections, “The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman World,” by Francisco Beltrán Lloris, is on the “epigraphic habit”—the study of the cultural practice of putting up inscriptions, which became an important historical question once it was recognized that the inclination to erect inscriptions varied over time and peaked towards the end of the second and beginning of the third centuries a.d. This chapter moves us towards contemplating how inscriptions work and why they matter, the subject of the next twenty-seven chapters, in a way that points...

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