Book Review: Mortuary Landscapes of North Africa

David L. Stone, Lea M. Stirling (ed.), Mortuary Landscapes of North Africa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Contributors: David L. Stone; Lea M. Stirling; Habib Ben Younes; Jennifer P. Moore; David J. Mattingly; Anna Leone; Michael McKinnon

Reviewed by Kathryn J. McDonnell, UCLA

The eight essays in the volume vary greatly in subject matter, methodology, and approach and provide a survey of trends in mortuary studies. These studies include: (1) in-depth examinations of a single facet of funerary practices, such as Stirling's own discussion of the cupula tomb type; (2) wide-ranging syntheses of evidence from multiple sites, such as Michael McKinnon's masterful analysis of human skeletal evidence; and (3) theoretical approaches, such as Stone and Stirling's co-authored introductory essay. The volume encompasses a wide range of chronological perspectives, from the first millennium BC to the Byzantine era.

In the introduction, "Funerary Monuments and Mortuary Practices in the Landscape of North Africa," the two editors set out current directions in landscape archaeology and contextualize the individual contributions to the volume within a theoretical framework. The directions they discuss include the role of ritual, the categorization of monument types, the interaction of individuals with the landscape, and acculturation exchange between groups. As careful as their discussion of approaches and methodology is, at the same time, in this reviewer's opinion, Stone and Stirling err by assuming an audience already familiar with the "major civilizations in ancient North Africa: Garamantian, Berber, Punic, Roman, and Early Christian" (14). They therefore omit a general overview of these peoples and of ancient North Africa as a topic within the introductory essay.