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Butrint 4: The Archaeology and Histories of an Ionian Town Inge Lyse Hansen, Richard Hodges,
Sarah Leppard eds. Butrint Archaeological Monographs Volume: 4. 2013. 250p, c.50 col &
c.325 b/w illus. Oxbow Books. ISBN: 9781842174623. 50.00
Butrint 4: The Archaeology and Histories of an Ionian Island Town offers a series of studies
derived from recent archaeological work at the site of Butrint. It is the fourth volume in the
Butrint Archaeological Monographs Series joining volumes on Byzantine Butrint, Roman
Butrint, and the excavations at the Trichonch Palace. Unlike these more traditional
publications focusing on periods or monuments, this volume brings together seventeen
smaller studies that took place with funding from the Butrint Foundation or as part of the
Butrint Project. Ranging from the Bronze Age to the 19th century, the studies in this volume
generally make an effort to locate this site within a wider Mediterranean world and
contribute valuable context, history, and detail to this significant site. More importantly, this
volume brings together small studies that might be otherwise lost in a scholarly journal or
marginalized in a larger publication.
The first and last articles in the volume provide some context for the other studies. Both
written by Richard Hodges, one of the volume's co-editors, they present the history of
excavation and conservation at the site as the primary context for Butrint in the late 20th and
early 21st century. The first chapter begins with a brief note on William Leake's early 19th c.
visit to the site before focusing on the important work of mid-20th century Italian
excavation team under the directions of Luigi Maria Ugolini. Funded by Musolini's fascist
government, Ugolini hoped to link Butrint to Virgil's Aeneid at a time when the government
was reimagining the Roman poem for nationalist and imperialist goals. For Ugolini's
Albanian successors, the site represented proof for historical continuity in Albania from the
earliest Illyrian groups until the foundation of the Albanian state. Hodges suggested that the
only way to counteract this history of nationalist archaeology at Butrint is to produce a
similarly robust assemblage of material from the site through large-scale excavation. This
statement should remain open to debate.
The final chapter of the book reflects on the efforts of the Butrint Foundation to create the
Butrint National Park to protect the archaeology and environment of the site and its
coastline. This chapter gives voice to the frustration of attempting to negotiate both the
Albanian national government and the various local concerns in ensuring that the park not
only was established, but also maintained. The successes and failures of this ongoing project
provide a way to return to his critique of the tensions between globalization and nationalism.
Butrint stands as both an archaeological site and as a historical place within a larger set of
forces. The economic realities of operating and imagining an archaeological park in a rapidly
changing political environment intersect with the historical forces that created the site over
the course of millennia.
The contributions framed by these two chapters present a mosaic of studies on the history
and archaeology of Butrint. The chapters are more or less organized in chronologically order
and alternate between specialized studies on structures associated with single periods and
diachronic treatments of part of the site of the landscape as a whole. In Chapter 2, David
Bescoby provides a brief environmental overview of the site in its dramatic setting
surrounded by lagoons, marshes, and mountains set as a microcosm of Braudel's

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Mediterranean. In Chapter 3, S. Lima introduces recent research on the Late Bronze Age and
Early Iron Age in the region bringing the work at Butrint into contact with the important
recent work on Bronze Age Epirus more broadly. Short, more detailed, chapters by Andrew
Wilson publish the city's aqueduct and by Sarah Leppard, publish a Roman bridge that linked
the peninsula to the mainland. The Roman aqueduct transported water from the hills to the
east of the town and may have used a reverse funnel to draw water across the Vivari Channel
to the city of Butrint. Clearing vegetation revealed the western end of the Roman bridge that
crossed the same channel clarified the road system on the adjacent Vrina Plain and provided
access to the fortified town. Inge Lyse Hansen's section on Roman sculpture from the site
includes a catalogue of previously unpublished fragments and a study of two relatively wellpreserved Roman period sculptures. Studies of the Castle of Ali Pasha Jose C. Caravajal and
Ana Palanca and the Venetian period documentary evidence by Siriol Davies provide
valuable evidence for the later history of the site.
Other contributors approached areas of the site in a diachronic way. Greenslade, Leppard,
and Logue present a useful, diachronic summary of recent work on Butrint's fortified and
monumental Acropolis. This approach complements Greenslade's treatment of the Roman
villa, turned church and Medieval elite residence on the Vrina plain. Similarly diachronic
approaches characterize the contribution on the two mausolea near the villa on the Vrina
plain, on the Well of Junia Rufina and its associated later cemetery, on the Great Basilica,
and on the long history of the city walls. Each of these chapters emphasizes the re-use of
space in the Butrint environs not as a testimony for continuity at the site, but as case studies
for the punctuated occupation of the site through time. It is clear, for example, that the site
of the Vrina villa saw a series of occupation events first as an elite villa constructed around a
series of courtyards, and the, after at least one episode of destruction, as a basilica style
church, and before once again becoming an elite residence
Like the other volumes in the Butrint Archaeological Monograph Series, this volume shows
attention to the interaction between various periods across the site, but there were some
missed opportunities to articulate the dynamic interaction between periods of occupation.
Joanita Vroom, for example, engaged the complexities of analyzing residual artifacts
associated with the Wall of Junia Rufina, but it would have been useful if this analysis was
extended to other sites and assemblages at Butrint. It was disappointing that diachronic
treatments of architecture likewise engaged so tentatively the use of spolia considering the
recent boom in scholarship on this phenomenon. Moreover, there was only a limited
discussion why certain sites saw reuse at various time. The presence of burials, for example,
during and after the main phase of the basilica on the Vrina plain suggest that the site may
have remained an important religious site through its function as a church and this extended
to its reconfiguration as domestic space. It would appear that the mausolea on the Vrina
plain also saw periods of later use punctuated by episodes of abandonment. Finally, the two
articles that studied refortification of the urban area included discussions of the long
Venetian period (14th -18th century), but neither did much to engage Siriol Daviess short
contribution on the history of the region from the Venetian archives.
The penultimate chapter considered the Castle of Ali Pasha on Butrint Bay at the mouth of
the Vivari Channel which was constructed in the 18th century by the Venetians and
modified throughout the 20th century. It seems like the authors may have missed an
opportunity here to engage the archaeology of the contemporary past as this site functioned

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in a modern military capacity. This would have provided a useful segue to the final chapter
by Richard Hodges which returns to the complex issues surrounding nationalism, continuity,
and the site's engagement with the wider Mediterranean world. The book is a valuable
contribution to the history of Butrint and its environs but also demonstrates the potential
and challenges of a diachronic archaeology deeply embedded in a historical sense of place.
William Caraher
University of North Dakota