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These two well-presented and readable volumes offer the final report on the rescue excavations conducted at Kilise Tepe in the Göksu valley of southern Turkey by a team from Cambridge in collaboration with the local museum at Silifke from 1994 to 1998. Since then, excavations have resumed at the site since 2007 for a further five-year period, this time as a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle. The excavators are to be credited for their speedy publication falling prior to the resumption of work at the site. Comprehensive and final as this monograph may be (p. 7), a supplementary publication concerning the finds of these first five years of excavation has recently appeared (S. Debruyne, "Tools and souvenirs: the shells from Kilise Tepe (1994-1998)â[euro], Anatolian Studies 60, 2010, 149-60).
The first volume describes the excavations and presents the finds, with no fewer than twenty-four eminent international contributors giving thorough and authoritative consideration to their specific fields in fifty-three chapters divided over six parts (A-F). The second volume contains archaeobotanical data; a lengthy index of excavation units, providing a handy reference tool for finding the context of each find; artefact drawings, maps, plans and sections. Despite the absence of an index relating the drawn artefacts to the pages on which they are discussed, it is easy to navigate between vol. 2 and vol. 1, as the figures are arranged in the same order in both volumes.
Volume 1 is divided into the following parts. Part A has the introduction, with chapters contributed by Nicholas Postgate and Mark Jackson giving background information on the site in various periods of its history as well as a summary of the excavation results in chapter 5. Part B, "The surface collectionâ[euro], by David Thomas, provides a thorough evaluation of distribution of pottery sherds on the surface in relation to the mound's morphology, including the illuminating observation that a cluster of sherds does not usually correlate to a structure under the surface. Part C contains The Excavations, in which various authors (S. Blakeney, L. Seffen, M. Jackson, N. Postgate, D. Thomas, D. Collon) present descriptions of the structures and objects unearthed in each of the site's five levels, from Early Bronze Age to...