The Caucasian Archaeology of the Holy Land: Armenian, Georgian and Albanian Communities between the Fourth and Eleventh Centuries CE. (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section One: The Near and Middle East, Volume 123.) xxiv, 307 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2018. €150. ISBN 978 90 04 36224 6 .

Yana Tchekhanovets: The Caucasian Archaeology of the Holy Land: Armenian, Georgian and Albanian Communities between the Fourth and Eleventh Centuries CE. (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section One: The Near and Middle East, Volume 123.) xxiv, 307 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2018. €150. ISBN 978 90 04 36224 6.

This is a timely and useful addition to the growing body of literature studying relationships between the early Christian cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus. Scholars are increasingly recognizing that the former Rome-centred approach to this period has offered a skewed picture of the material culture of the region and, by concentrating on interactions between centres of power, has not properly explored what was happening in societies perceived to be on the periphery of influential empires. Tchekhanovets has essentially taken the first step in the process for scholars of material culture wishing to understand the links between the three Christian Caucasian societies of late antiquity and the Holy Land by offering a summary of what was already known from the literary sources and attempting to map that data on to the extant archaeological data for the region. This is an exercise rendered more challenging by the linguistic expertise necessary to undertake such a study – not only should the scholar have a knowledge of Byzantine Greek, Armenian and Georgian, but as is demonstrated in this work, fluent English and Russian are also imperative if the archives of the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations are to be fully re-evaluated. The volume demonstrates how...