Medieval Rural Settlements in the Syrian Coastal Region (12th and 13th Centuries) by Balázs Major (review)

This monograph is the publication of Major’s 2008 PhD thesis on the Crusader-period settlements of Syria’s coastal region, but it draws on the full 15 years of research that Major conducted as the director of the Syro-Hungarian Archaeological Mission (SHAM) from 2000 to 2015. The devastation caused by the onset of conflict in 2011 has posed an unprecedented threat to the region’s archaeological heritage, and the reader cannot help but weigh this book in light of these ongoing catastrophic events. While the conflict was not the primary motivation for Major’s research, the book’s documentation of Crusader-era fortifications represents a step toward recording the region’s cultural heritage and contributes a new case study for the eastern Mediterranean archaeological community.

The book’s summary bills the study as a multi-pronged research program combining medieval documents, maps, toponyms, aerial imagery, oral sources, and archaeological survey to understand the rural settlements of the Syrian coastal region. Unfortunately, the reader hoping to learn more about the “archaeology of rural settlements” will be disappointed by the book’s primary focus on fortified sites, sparse discussion of methodology, and prioritization of historical sources over archaeological data. Where the book shines, however, is in its critical analysis of the historical trajectory of the region in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, synthesizing for the first time a rich body of Latin and Arabic chronicles, travelers’ accounts, and earlier archaeological work in the region. It is clear that Major’s primary research goal is to identify the fortified sites mentioned in various historical chronicles. The discovery of previously unknown sites—and, particularly, those of the non-fortified variety—seems to have been a distant second priority.

The text is divided into seven chapters, with additional sections for the photographs and plan drawings. The chapters themselves are uneven in length and would have benefited from a more user-friendly organization. For example, the introduction (Chapter 1), geographical setting (Chapter 2), and conclusion (Chapter 7) amount to only five pages altogether. Expanding these sections would have helped orient the reader to the broader geographical context of the study region and allowed Major to give an explicit and much-needed statement of the project’s research goals. Throughout the text, numbered headings are used inconsistently (the two case studies in Chapter 5 are not assigned headings, despite being critical components of the chapter), section titles are sometimes labeled incorrectly, and the organization of the subsections can be confusing at times.

The chapter on methodology (Chapter 3) reviews the previous research in the area and the main sources of data for the project, including historical sources, an assortment of supplementary data (maps, historical photographs, information from local residents, and toponyms), and medieval pottery encountered during site visits. Overall, this chapter will leave a survey archaeologist unsatisfied, particularly because only three paragraphs are allotted to the discussion of methods employed during field research. No details are given about the total size of the study area, the areas where survey was conducted, the criteria used when collecting pottery, how much material was collected, or what other types of materials were encountered. The text also hints at a very limited use of spatial technologies that are now common (and critical) parts of archaeological research. Major reports that GPS was used only at “extensive sites with many scattered archaeological features” (p. 12), and the images and maps suggest that GIS was used only to plot the locations of features and sherd scatters. The use of satellite imagery is also surprisingly limited considering the number of studies in Syria that are now using satellite imagery to detect and track damage to archaeological sites. Major reported that it was difficult to locate sites in the imagery (p. 12), and...