Since Horden and Purcell published their Corrupting Sea in 2000 there has been increased interest in larger syntheses that focus broadly on the Mediterranean and strive to make the concept of connectivity heuristically fruitful. Simultaneously, interest in the characteristics and periodization(s) of the Late Antiquity remains unabated. The book reviewed here is committed to both trends. On one hand, the specific socio-geographic location of islands represents the tension between isolation and connectivity in a nutshell. On the other hand, the focus is on change and how to deal with it – specifically how islands are socio-politically positioned in a volatile late antiquity. As a contrast, Luke Lavan’s book on the economy of inland regions comes to mind, as it deals specifically with landlocked regions in late antiquity. Combining both books provides an even more holistic picture of the Mediterranean, its networks, and the question of integration.

This book is the result of a conference that took place at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World in 2017. It consists of 12 contributions, all in English, as well as a short foreword from the editors, an introduction to the authors, and a particularly useful index. Eleven of the authors are men and five are women. The contributions, which are in most cases squarely rooted in archaeology, are organized geographically from West to East and cover the wide geographical area from Mallorca to Cyprus. They consider not only the larger islands of the Mediterranean but also smaller ones, such as the Adriatic islands off the Dalmatian coast and Naxos.