The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. Edited by David K. Pettegrew, William R. Caraher, and Thomas W. Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xv + 707 pp. $175.00 hardcover; $174.99 e-book

For more than a decade now, beginning with Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David Hunter's The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (2008), Oxford University Press has produced an impressive line of topical handbooks on late antiquity and early Christianity that has summarized the state of the field in philology and literature, history, theology, and the art and architectural history of the early Christian world. The introduction is particularly helpful since it offers a succinct summary of the earliest archaeological investigations in the early modern period and Enlightenment; followed by the systemization and organization of early Christian archaeology as a distinct subfield in the nineteenth century; and, finally, the expansion of regional and more indigenously managed archaeology across Europe, North Africa, and West Asia from the mid-twentieth century to the present. [...]the juxtaposition of regional chapters allows the reader to examine larger geographical and chronological developments in early Christian settlement patterns; the distribution of theology, architectural typologies, and art; and more indigenous cultural responses to the adoption of Christianity in late antiquity.