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The Anarchy: War and status in 12th-century landscapes of conflict, by Oliver H. Creighton & Duncan W. Wright, 2017. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; ISBN 9781781382424 hardback, 288 pp., 52 b/w figs, 19 colour pls.

intervenes to benefit one meaningful past above so many others? Ultimately, what Bassi characterizes as ‘a desire to preserve the ontological integrity of archaeological objects’ (p. 188–9) is less an issue of defending archaeology’s empirical ground than trying to come to terms with that which resists the text, that which holds a surplus reality beyond it and cannot always be evaluated through it. This is the point of Bjørnar Olsen’s plea, which grounds his book In Defense of Things (2010), namely that objects have been relegated to ‘oblivion and displacement’. For Bassi lightly to brush aside this plea as an overstatement on the part of Olsen is to disregard those non-discursive aspects of things that surpass their relations to texts and in the process allow her normally balanced authorial voice to waver. According to Bassi, Olsen’s attempt to engage ‘things qua things’ lacks clarity with respect to how archaeologists might access this ‘meaning’. This, for her, leads us into a Catch-22, for how else are we to engage things? How else, indeed! Here, Bassi overlooks a significant difference to be found in archaeological texts, the presence ofmaps, illustration and photography. Though they may be framed by text, these other modes of engagement, along with video, sound, or other affective manifestations, permit archaeologists to translate something of those qualities that words alone cannot convey. Clearly the ‘relationship between objects and texts as sources of evidence for what happened in the past’ (p. 188) is important, yet there is so much more to archaeology as a field that enters into direct engagements with ceramiclittered surfaces, chamber tombs, or stone chests containing inscribed bronze straps. Virtually nothing is said of the archaeological process, which negotiates the so-called radical divide between the material world and text. It is not that an archaeologist begins with a ‘prediscursive’ material world and moves to ways of discussing it—there is no direct route from one to the other. Both the concrete and tangible aspects of ceramics, mud brick, or stone socle and their legible, compatible and textual qualities are simultaneously defined through a long process of transformation that results in the fine edge that is the archaeological publication, among other things—archives, collections, archaeological sites, etc. Bruno Latour’s powerful notion of circulating reference reminds us how there is not one yawning gap between what remains of Troy and our descriptions of it, but multiple ones, bridged by a chain of reference between notebooks, labels, lists, catalogues and articles and objects undergoing definition in the course of fieldwork and laboratory study, archives and typological comparanda. Yes, the ‘dialogic interplay between empirical observation and linguistic representation’, a dynamic central to protoarchaeological narratives, ‘conditions the ways archaeologists talk about their discipline’ (p. 201), but only in part. My point in entertaining these seemingly trivial details is that they are central to any dialogue that Bassi may wish to open between historians, philologists and archaeologists. We cannot ignore the ways that texts have come to define objects of archaeological concern, but neither can we subsume them to other objects or subject them to an anthropocentric notion thatmeaning is everything. Archaeologists are obliged to resist appropriating things over to neat stories of the past, or rendering them as detached from their present situation. This is why common ground is not to be found in a shared starting point, but in a mutual telos, that may or may not take shape in the form of literature.