1 BMCR 2020.04.49 Change and resilience: the occupation of Mediterranean islands in late antiquity Miguel Angel Cau Ontiveros, Catalina Mas Florit, Change and resilience: the occupation of Mediterranean islands in late antiquity. Joukowsky Institute publication, 9. Oxford; Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2019. xxviii, 308 p.. ISBN 9781789251807 $45.00 (pb). Review by Paul P. Pasieka, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Technische Universität Darmstadt. ppasieka@uni-mainz.de [Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.] Since Horden and Purcell published their Corrupting Sea in 2000[1] 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.[2]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. The short foreword introduces the topic, however apart from David Abulafia’s contribution (see below), a genuine synopsis of the essays is missing. Therefore, the opportunity for a comparative contextualization or—above all—an in-depth conceptual examination of insularity, change, or resilience has been missed. Islands were chosen as the subject of the study because, although integrated into the wider Mediterranean, they offer the possibility to study individual developments in phases of transformation and change. The stated aim is not just to deal with late antiquity as a period of change, but to rethink change, its conditions, and consequences in general, without a rigid and specific definitional framework. Resilience, a relatively new concept in ancient studies, is understood both as the type of change (“how things changed”, p. xxiv) and the ability to react to change (“what the adaptations were”, p. xxiv). Therefore, resilience becomes a general ability to deal with and react to change without normative-adaptive transformations. Although this seems inconsistent with usual definitions, which see resilience in relation to vulnerability and crisis,[3] it is probably due to the effort to remove the negative connotations surrounding late antiquity. Unfortunately, only a few essays explicitly deal with the concept of resilience, and some do not use it at all. Zanini, however, conceptualizes resilience