As one of the authors of Citadel to City State, I believe that it is inappropriate for me to rate it. However, Amazon's format forces me to assign a rating to the book and since I am proud of it, I gave it a high rating. I can confess that work invested in the book was rewarding and even pleasant, at least most of the time. And I was happy to learn that the publisher judged it worthy of a paperback edition so that our picture of early Greece might reach more people.

Its focus is the centuries between the collapse of the heroic Mycenaean civilization and the Classical Age of Greece, i.e. from a civilization based on citadels to one founded on city states. Once thought to be a long, bleak period in which little of significance occurred, new evidence shows it to be a bridge of transformation from one way of life to another. We track that process by focusing on five individual places that demonstrate the steps in the process, a Plutarch's Lives of Places rather than of People.

A recent and suprising token of the appeal of our approach was an invitation to speak to a joint meeting of the local Sigma Xi chapter and the Puget Sound American Chemical Society. The inviter wrote, "recently I read your book, Citadel to City State...It was intriguing about how, in the absence of writing, that it was possible to piece together the social events of that period." The book showed, he continued, "the synergy between the sciences and the humanities." Lessening the divide between the sciences and humanities was not a conscious goal of our book but it is an unexpected and welcome result. Growing specialization has produced such tight compartments of fields over the past half century that collaboration has been difficult. The new spirit of cooperation and interest is vital to an understanding of the base.

Definitely not light reading for anyone but those with a fair background in Greek history and archaeology. The book is, however, quite thorough and uses an interesting approach to the subjects of political and social development in the early Greek world, focusing on the archaeology of specific type sites. Since much of what emerged during this critical period in European history has an impact still felt, however unconsciously, on modern society, the book is an important one. It might even be useful as part of a syllabus for selected courses in political science.

There always seems to be a gap between the very ancient Greece of the Iliad and the ancient Greece of Athens. This book sheds light on this period of transition from the days of the citadel society familiar from accounts of the Trojan War to the more familiar days of the classics. Since the Greek Dark Ages were illiterate, this book is organized around a series of archaeological sites and discusses their social structure, physical artifacts and historical context. This book does an excellent job of presenting the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age and from the fortress kingdoms to the city states.Towards the end, it offers a glimpse of the origins of the city state oligarchies that figured so prominently in the origins of our own civilization.

First, this book is not really out of print -- its printed on demand based on the number of copies your order includes which means it really is available for instructors to use in their classes. The chapters are interestingly written though instructor will find it very useful to give their students an overview and an outline of the important information. A great addition would be a workbook to accompany it so that students and instructors could have several test cases to use the methods discussed in the book. I'll be using it during a summer undergraduate course.