ONLINE PUBLICATIONS: BOOK REVIEW AJA 115.1 (January 2011) American Journal of Archaeology Book Review Copyright © 2011 Archaeological Institute of America The Black Sea: Past, Present and Future: Proceedings of the International, Interdisciplinary Conference, Istanbul, 14–16 October 2004 By Gülden Erkut and Stephen Mitchell (British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara Monograph 42). Pp. 172, figs. 99, tables 17. British Institute at Ankara, London 2007. $60. ISBN 978-1-898249-21-4 (cloth). This book is a result of a conference or- ganized by the British Academy Black Sea Initiative of the British Institute at Ankara and the City Planning Department of the Istanbul Technical University in 2004. The volume includes 16 of the more than 50 papers and posters presented at the conference. The con- tributions cover the Upper Paleolithic period to the present day, that is, ca. 32,000 years. The editors have sensibly divided the volume into five parts: (1) “The Earliest History”; (2) “Settlement, Acculturation and Exchange in the First Millennium B.C.E.”; (3) “Black Sea Interconnections from Medieval to Modern Times”; (4) “Social and Economic Change in the Turkish Black Sea Region”; and (5) “The Future of the Past in the Black Sea Region.” Of these, the first two are of particular interest to archaeologists. In the first chapter, Yanko-Hombach dis- cusses the so-called Noah’s Flood hypothesis of Ryan and Pitman, who suggested that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake approximately 140 m below the present level until about 8,000–7,000 years b.p. (calibrated), when the Mediterranean Sea forced its way through the Bosporus, rapidly filling up this lake and forcing a large-scale change in settlement patterns that resulted in the early Neolithic farmers moving into the interior of Europe (e.g., W.B.F. Ryan and W.C. Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History [New York 1998]). Through new research, Yanko-Hombach and her team reach the conclusion that a gradual process involving six transgression-regression stages during the last 10,000 years brought the Black Sea to its present level. Moreover, the Bosporus may not have been the only connec- tion between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the Sapanka Lake and the Sakarya River being alternatives. The second paper, by Dolukhanov, is a report on archaeological surveys from 2003 and 2004 in northern Armenia, which suggest that this area was quite densely settled with Achaeulean and Mousterian sites of early hominids (skeletal remains of Homo erectus had earlier been found at one site) and Neander- thals. The Neanderthals were numerous in the Caucasus, as attested both by skeletal remains and by Mousterian industries, until ca. 28,000 years b.p. (calibrated). Since there is no clear indication of authentic Upper Paleolithic sites, the immigration of modern humans into the area seems to have begun in the Late Glacial phase. This last wave of immigration was characterized by the spread of agricultural Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites. The second part opens with an interesting contribution by Summerer on the archaeology of the southern coast of the Black Sea in the first millennium B.C.E., a period and region that, for various reasons, has been seriously lacking in archaeological studies, particularly by com- parison with the northern and western coasts. The study concentrates on the hinterland of Amisus, where the archaeological finds offer