We commend González-Ruibal et al. (above) for their well-formulated challenge to a widely held view in Anglophone archaeology. Their insistence that archaeologists must rethink their position in a radically changed political context is highly apposite, although we do not agree entirely with all of their arguments. Here, we address three principal issues.

And now what? This anxious question torments many of us in the current socio-political moment: that of Trumpism and Brexit; of resurgent xenophobia and racism expressed through election results and policies around Europe; and of the return of fascism and Nazism. It is this moment that has prompted González-Ruibal et al. (above) to call for a new, politicised archaeology. In so doing, they urge archaeologists to abandon the soothing liberal but ineffective embrace of communities and the public. They also argue against identitarian politics and the discourse of apolitical and abstract multiculturalism. I am in broad agreement with them, and called some years ago for a shift from ethics to politics, and for an explicit, public political stance (Hamilakis 2007). If the politicisation of archaeology was important 10 years ago, it is much more urgent now.

The early medieval period in Europe is commonly viewed as a time of emerging nations, as the institutions, lineages and territories that we recognise as integral to medieval and later states were established. The preoccupation with nationhood is the primary reason that earlier generations of early medieval scholars often limited the geographic focus of their studies, with their findings feeding back into broader narratives of national culture, identity and ethnicity. Such research traditions have taken some time to evolve, but thankfully the last decade or so has seen a marked increase in the publication of archaeologically orientated studies with a broader remit. The ability to compare and contrast the evidence from other regions has resulted in a much- improved research environment, transforming our understanding of the period. Two of the publications reviewed here, Fortified settlements in early medieval Europe and Making Christian landscapes in Atlantic Europe, represent the latest additions to this positive trend, comprising edited volumes with impressive coverage across the Continent. While the third volume, Social complexity in early medieval rural communities, is concentrated solely on Iberia, it is an equally welcome addition, as its publication in English is likely to broaden readership and open up the archaeology of the area to new audiences. Each contribution explores distinct material, although the articulation of elite power, and the means by which archaeologists can detect that power, is the prominent theme throughout.

2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of both the Society for Historical Archaeology, in North America, and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, in the UK. Each society celebrated this milestone by publishing a collection of forward-looking essays in their respective journals (see Brooks 2016; Matthews 2016). Although each group of practitioners has followed what might be best described as parallel, but not convergent, intellectual tracks, what they have shared is a common focus on the period of European expansion and colonialism starting in the late fifteenth century. Since that time, the two fields have grown much closer, while the larger intellectual project that is historical archaeology has seen its popularity grow across the globe. In many respects, these three volumes, while different, nevertheless provide a rich collection of chapters that reveal both the widening and deepening of the field.

As the authors of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies manifesto (Campbell & Smith 2011), there are aspects of the debate piece by González-Ruibal et al. (above) that we have no trouble agreeing with, but we take issue with other elements. This paper sets up far too many straw people, based on a limited engagement with the archaeological and heritage studies literature. At its heart, and despite the radical rhetoric, Gonzalez-Ruibal et al.’s paper is another defence of archaeological expertise by archaeologists, based on a dubious equation of reactionary politics with communities and the popular.

The three volumes reviewed here have different origins but a common theme: all try to put some social or cultural anthropology into, or back into, archaeology. In the United Kingdom these are separate disciplines anyway, but in North America they are usually taught in the same department and have similar interests. The problem is that they are growing apart.

These three ambitious, successful and highly rewarding books help us to rethink the archaeology of ancient China and its context. The work co-authored by Linduff, Sun, Cao and Liu is the most wide-ranging. It offers an overview of ancient Chinese interactions with Central Asian neighbours over more than two millennia, from the first beginnings of metal use up to the Iron Age. It also aims to change the narrative of this region by re-interpreting the ‘Inner Asian frontier’ as a multi-centred, dynamic, diverse and changing ‘contact zone’ unlike the uniform barbarian steppe set apart from incipient Chinese civilization that an earlier literature tended to imagine. The authors focus on distinct yet overlapping aspects of life and interaction on this frontier—‘technoscapes’, ‘individualscapes’, ‘lineagescapes’, ‘regionscapes’—departing from the Sinocentric view where the only interesting questions about ancient frontier peoples were how the barbarians contributed (or not), to the making of the (glory of the) Sino-centres. The recent exciting debates over the Shimao “city too far north” (Jaang et al. 2018) come to mind!

González-Ruibal et al. raise challenging issues that seem frightening in their implications. In both their specificity and their wider theoretical contexts, I had previously given these issues little thought, and some I had not even recognised. I share fully the authors’ concern that archaeologists must seek ways to engage people influenced by ‘reactionary populism’, people who “are diverse, fragmented and complex”, and who may be “greedy, patriarchal, xenophobic or uninterested in the past” (González-Ruibal et al. above). The authors find fault with the multi-vocal, multi-cultural approaches of epistemic populist archaeologies that tend to exclude most of those who fit this description. I could object to some of the details of the authors’ critiques of epistemic populism and heritage studies, but their core arguments are mostly correct and powerful. At the same time, at least within a North American context, I think that archaeologists have generally reacted to the various populist pressures of the past century and that we have already started to do what the authors suggest.