A recent history lesson: in February of 2020, the ‘Exchanging Ideas: Trade, Technology and Connectivity in Pre-Roman Italy’ conference was held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. This conversation on connectivity just before the world entered into years of disconnect and social isolation birthed the Mediterranean Archaeology Australian Research Community and produced two sibling volumes: 2022’s Production, Trade, and Connectivity in Pre-Roman Italy, edited by Armstrong and Cohen, and 2023’s Adoption, Adaptation, and Innovation in Pre-Roman Italy: Paradigms for Cultural Change, edited by Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder. In attendance in Auckland was Bernard, who, in addition to contributing to the former volume, also published the sole-authored Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy in 2023. This review article addresses each of these texts in this order, insofar as they are each concerned with investigating technology, identity and connectivity in pre-Roman Italy through post-colonial and/or holistic lenses.

Armstrong and Cohen open their volume with the claim that the strength of their multivariate approach lies not in the chapters themselves, but in the dialogue, overlay and connections between them (pp. 13–14). In the spirit of this approach, I encourage readers to do the same with these texts – while each brings many exciting ideas and discussions to the table, their true strength lies in the connections between them, and the dialogues across which they speak. I will elucidate on those that jumped out at me, but if people have an interest in connectivities, identities, histories and post-colonial approaches to pre-Roman Italy, they are encouraged to read these works in tandem and discover more points of connectivity.

The volume Production, Trade, and Connectivity in Pre-Roman Italy is approachable and digestible, with each pair of chapters (to my eyes, intentionally or not) sharing a theme that makes for interesting comparative reading and supports the editors’ intent for the strength of the volume being found in the connections between chapters.

Chapter 1, ‘Communities and Connectivities in Pre-Roman Italy’ by Cohen and Amstrong, lays the groundwork for the discussions to come, putting forward the idea that the discipline ought to eschew ‘the goal of identifying groups in favour of identifying layers of connectivities’ (p. 8) and proposing the device of ‘imagined communities’ as a fruitful method for problematising and unpacking the tensions that still exist between literary and archaeological evidence when it comes to explorations of ancient identities. Chapter 2, ‘Enchanted Trade: Technicians and the City’ by C. Smith, explores the development of theory over the last 30 years as applied to trade in eighth–fifth-century Italy. Focusing on theory as it does, Smith’s chapter pairs well with the introductory first, offering further considerations on connectivity and how cultural change is found in the connections between peoples.

Chapter 3, ‘Metallurgy and Connectivity in Northern Etruria’ by S. Bernard, highlights the connectivities between economic production, sociopolitical concerns and warfare, bringing to the fore the very human and unpredictable nature of connectivities – that individuals are not rational actors and their actions and movements are heavily influenced by social relations. Chapter 4, ‘Hephaestus’ Workshop: Craftspeople, Elites, and Bronze Armour in Pre-Roman Italy’ by Armstrong, speaks to the production of bronze armour as an indicator of elite status and connectivities as much as the armour itself demonstrates its use and wear as a material object. Armstrong recasts these bronzesmiths as skilled craftspeople who stoked a social and professional circle, with iterant skilled smiths acting as instigators of technological diffusion and cultural (ex)change, achieving an elite status in the process. This pair of chapters is a strong start to the volume, exploring the ‘human element’ of connectivity in a convincing and engaging fashion.

Chapter 5, ‘Potters and Mobility in Southern Italy (500–300 bce)’ by E.G.D. Robinson, revisits the evidence for mobility of individuals through painted pottery. Robinson problematises the physical and cultural mobility of painted styles through centring the human element of their transmission, highlighting that potters were skilled mobile agents who moved of their own accord or were invited into communities. Through this lens, Robinson explores the permeability of ‘borders’ in southern Italy. Chapter 6, ‘“The Potter is by Nature a Social Animal”: A Producer-Centred Approach to Regionalisation in the South Italian Matt-Painted Tradition’ by L. Bernardo-Ciddio, explores similar themes, exploring the reality of craftspeople as social actors whose decisions were rooted in dynamic social worlds. In doing so, Bernardo-Ciddio champions interactions between producer(s) and community(s) of practice over those between broad ‘cultural groups’, demonstrating how boundary objects are born of these connectivities and social interactions, and, like Robinson, delightfully problematises the appropriateness of ‘borders’.

Chapter 7, ‘Bronzesmiths and the Construction of Material Identity in Central Italy (1000–700 bce)’ by C. Iaia, argues for the role of mobile craftspeople helping construct new collective and individual identities for emerging social groups in early central Italy through the exploration of metalwork in burial contexts. The coming together of craftspeople – here, bronzesmiths – brought new ideas and technologies together to transform not only the craft, but also the emerging elites and their circles who actively sought out the capital that such works signalled. Chapter 8, ‘The “Bradano District” Revisited: Tombs, Trade, and Identity in Interior Peucetia’ by B. Peruzzi, investigates geographical variability (primarily, coastal and interior) in burial customs in sixth–fourth-century central Apulia and the resultant impact on expressions of cultural identity. In exploring funerals and funerary contexts as an area to negotiate status, Peruzzi, like Iaia, reminds readers of the need to (re)consider the fluidity of object use and understandings as they interacted with, and were engaged by, agential peoples in different social and geographic contexts.

Chapter 9, ‘Etruscan Trading Spaces and the Tools for Regulating Etruscan Markets’ by H. Becker, is the first of two chapters that focuses on space and movement. The strength of Becker’s argument comes through the investigation of Etruscan market spaces as not just places of commerce, but of connectivities, highlighting the connections between trade and economic networks, calendars and seasonal activities, and religious ties between markets and festivals. The chapter’s framing of markets and trading spaces as equal socio-cultural and economic spaces recalls the importance of placing agential peoples at the centre of cultural processes. Chapter 10, ‘A Mobile Model of Cultural Transfer in Pre-Roman Southern Italy’ by C. Heitz, argues for the permanency of mobility. Heitz demonstrates the importance of transhumance and pastoral mobility to the everyday life of major parts of the regional population of pre-Roman southern Italy, showing readers that something as simple as shepherds and landowners negotiating rights of passage and land use maintained, and at times created, supra-regional networks. The places where these mobile parties came together formed the nodes of a connectivity network of information sharing, contract-making, feasting and community building.

Chapter 11, ‘Mechanisms of Community Formation in Pre-Roman Italy: A Latticework of Connectivity and Interaction’ by Cohen, offers the first of two conclusive chapters to the volume. Cohen opens strong, presenting a critical framing that underscores each work under review here – ‘any specific identity or ethnicity is ill-suited as a structuring principle for exploring community formation itself. Instead, identity should be considered as one possible variable or outcome within a larger context of community formation and social interaction’ (p. 227). Cohen continues with an exploration of the ‘lattice of connectivity’, which underpins constructions of identity, recalling T. Ingold’s work on ‘meshwork’ connectivity, Smith’s discussion earlier in this volume, Bernard’s explorations of social interactions and other contemporaneous publications, such as S. Ramgopal’s article on (dis)connectivity in the Roman Empire (JRS 112 [2022]). I found the resultant lattice-work model – discussed and demonstrated throughout the volume – promising, effectively bringing together decades of scholarship on investigating identities through material culture and historiographical traditions. Chapter 12, ‘Epilogue: Writing of Connectivity at a Time of Isolation’ by E. Isayev, drives home the centrality of human agency to connectivity through a poignant retrospective on the (im)mobilities that bind the preceding chapters and the reader. Speaking directly from the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Isayev concludes the volume with a reflection on the preceding chapters, highlighting the intersections between chapters and questioning the connectedness of the contemporary world if we do not allow for the chance encounters producing such intersections.

Like its sister volume, Adoption, Adaptation, and Innovation in Pre-Roman Italy: Paradigms for Cultural Change, is an engaging archaeological work that brings together authors and case studies from across pre-Roman Italy. Keenly, the editors stress that, ‘while its companion volume highlighted ways in which we might reconsider and reidentify social and cultural groups in pre-roman Italy on their own terms, albeit also through the lens of connectivities and production, this volume explores the ways in which these groups engaged with cultural change and exchange’ (p. 20). In this, Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder are successful. Again, groupings of chapters make for interesting conversations within the volume.

Chapter 1, ‘Rethinking Cultural (Ex)Change in Pre-Roman Italy’ by Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder, engages with conversations on cultural identity and interaction held between the volumes, and in the discipline at large over the last few decades, though the focus shifts to ‘groups engaging with cultural change, rather than how groups identify on their own terms’ (p. 20). Of note is this volume’s focus on a very human truth – that communities are built on trust and are social and relational by definition. To this end, this chapter, paired with Smith’s Chapter 2 in the preceding volume, offers a primer on pre-Roman connectivities, and the following chapters are successful in providing varied case studies in support of this dynamic.

Chapters 2–4 unpack, problematise and deliver this goal. Chapter 2, ‘The Paradox of Innovation in Conservative Societies’ by N. Terrenato, offers a welcome reframing of our understanding of cultural change in Iron Age Italy through a sociological lens, allowing readers to look beyond the apparent paradox of conservative traditional societies embracing cultural change and see instead the human element – the agential choices of transforming and adapting traditional elements to meet change – on display. Chapter 3, ‘Mixing up Mediterranean Innovation: The Case of Viticulture and Wine’ by F. De Angelis, places the human at a similar centre-stage through a case study of viticulture in the pre-Roman Western Mediterranean, and, much like a favourite bottom shelf bottle of red blend, De Angelis finds that the reality of cultural and economic transfers is more mixed than currently imagined. De Angelis’s championing of a mixed methodological and holistic approach to the evidence is welcome, and the focus on microregions is one that complements the wider conversations introduced in Chapter 1. Chapter 4, ‘The World has Changed: Insularity and Tyrrhenian Connectivity during the Corsican Iron Ages’ by M. Lechenault and K. Peche-Quilchini, flows very nicely from the preceding chapters, with readers treated to an application of the discussed approaches close to this reviewer’s heart. Through a case study of Bronze and Iron Age Corsica, the authors explore the push and pull between island insularity and connectivity, casting light on coastal microregions, which are insular and yet not isolated, thanks to material and immaterial transmissions of human agents. Together with Chapter 1, this volume opens strong and differentiates itself from its sister volume (and Bernard’s book) through its reminder that at the core of cultural change and connectivity lie the very human dynamics of trust and relationship building.

Chapters 5 (‘Folding Meaning in an Object: The Ficoroni Cista and the Heterarchy of Art in Early Italy’ by J.N. Hopkins), 6 (‘Virtue in Variety: Contrasting Temple Design in Etruscan Italy’ by C.R. Potts) and 7 (‘The Demon is in the Detail: Greek Pottery in Etruscan Funerary Contexts’ by Rhodes-Schroder) revel in the human element at the centre of cultural change, allowing ancient peoples and material cultures to speak between and across boundaries. Hopkins’s analysis of the Ficoroni Cista through the lens of cultural fluidity challenges readers to understand the object as one that defies cultural categorisation and ‘reached across boundaries, communicating discretely based on a viewer’s own visual acuities’ (p. 80). Potts takes a different approach, using differing plans of Archaic Etruria temple sanctuaries to demonstrate the power of cultural boundaries, intentional juxtaposition and visual variety. Rhodes-Schroder invokes a third approach, invoking polysemy – the coexistence of many possible meanings – to bring understanding to the popularity of Greek mythical episodes in Etruscan ceramic contexts and using quantitative data to analyse how Etruscan communities received and transformed meaning and imagery. Read in tandem, these chapters have much to offer to those who wish to take a step back and view these human processes and interactions from a new perspective. Relatedly, Chapter 8, ‘Local Choices in a Networked World: Funerary Practices at Crustumerium (Lazio) during the Long Seventh Century bce’ by P. Attema, B. Belelli Marchesini and M. Catsman, reveals the impact that local and overlapping cultural connections had on funerary practices in eighth–sixth-century Crustumerium through the lens of ‘consumption collectives’ – ‘an etically defined situational group of individuals or community based on the archaeologically visible shared consumption of one or more multiple specific objects and/or consumption of preferences for specific object shapes, ware types, or decoration types’ (p. 119). The findings and discussions of the pilot study are particularly engaging for those interested in network analysis, best read alongside Peruzzi’s Chapter 8 in the sister volume and Bernard’s Chapter 4.

Chapters 9 (‘From the Ground Up: Constructing Monumental Buildings in Archaic Central Italy’ by A.K. Pavlick), 10 (‘The Archaic Countryside Revisited: A Ceramic Approach to the Study of Archaic Rural Infill in Latium Vetus’ by G. Tol) and 11 (‘Ritual Connectivity in Adriatic Italy’ by C. Norman) seek to address specific gaps in their respective subjects through the lens of cultural change and innovation. Pavlick’s exploration of the choices made by the building commissioners of Archaic central Italy’s monumental structures (particularly those on the Roman Via Sacra and in Acquarossa) is centred around a discussion of tiled roofs as evidence for the deployment of new technologies, the socio-political capital and decisions that underpin them and the why behind such changes. The result is the most compelled I have ever been by rooftops and reminds readers of the visual statements that such structures projected onto their landscape. Tol addresses a gap in our understanding of central Italian rural Archaic assemblages, re-examining and problematising the ceramic record of the Pontine region. In doing so, Tol unpacks the existing identification bias at play in and around the region, offering a more modest – but evidential – degree of ruralisation, which well supports the volume’s focus on regional variations driven by human agents. Norman’s study of the ‘ritual ecology’ of Archaic Adriatic Italy presents a visually rich argument for clusters of ritualised behaviours, which are often less visible than their Tyrrhenian counterparts. With thematic similarities to Chapters 5–7 of this volume, Norman argues in favour of local forms of, and purposes for, ritual objects, distinct from the Adriatic coast of Italy. The network of regions Norman identifies covers peninsular Italy, Illyria and the Hallstatt regions, arguing that, while in contact with the Eastern Mediterranean, they operated in their own distinct fashion. I believe Norman is successful in the hope that ‘this brief overview has added something more to our appreciation of the multivariant strata of cultural connectivity at play’, with the work a welcome addition to a volume heavy on western Italy.

Chapters 12 (‘Face to Face: Isolated Heads in South Italian and Etruscan Visual Culture’ by K.E. Heuer), 13 (‘Feasting Transformed: Commensal Identity Expression and Social Transformation in Iron Age and Archaic Western Sicily’ by W.M. Balco) and 14 (‘The Deep Past of Magna Graecia’s Pottery Traditions: Adoption and Adaptation at Timpone della Motta and in the Sibaritide (Northen Calabria, Italy) between the Middle Bronze Age and the Archaic Period’ by P. Attema, C. Colelli, M. Guggisberg, F. Ippolito, J. Kindberg Jacobsen, G. Mittica, W. de Neef and S. Grove Saxkjær) close the volume, moving the attention to Southern Italy and Sicily, and exploring cultural change in Magna Graecia and interactions between Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians and indigenous Sicilian and Italian groups. Heuer’s chapter focuses on the ‘isolated heads’ motif of south Italian red-figure, drawing links between their appearances in material culture and eschatological beliefs in the late classical and early Hellenistic periods. Heuer’s decision to expand their study beyond red-figure into comparative material culture (such as capitals, tombs and urns) clearly demonstrates how the isolated head became a key visual symbol for transitional states and embodied a hoped-for outcome to an uncertain future. Of all the chapters in the volume, Heuer’s benefits most from the full colour illustrations. Balco’s discussion of Elymian feasting vessels of Archaic Western Sicily speaks well to the spirit of the volume, through a centring of the human element (here, indigenous voices) in a discussion of Elymian–Greek–Phoenician cultural exchange. The chapter is robustly supported through the application of cultural hybridity theory and social entanglement through a post-colonial lens, which is critical in locating indigenous Elymian voices. Through a robust analysis of several key vessels Balco demonstrates how the indigenous Elymi borrowed elements of Greek feasting ritual and ritual forms, preserving their social identities and status while finding new expressions for them. Readers interested in conversations of ‘pluralised’ identities will find an interesting and thought-provoking parallel, and a cogent example of the application of post-colonial theory to the discipline. Attema et al. bring a similar approach to the final chapter of the volume, taking the longue durée of pottery wares on Timpone della Motta (north Calabria, near the Ionian coast) to understand the adoptions and adaptions of styles undertaken by the indigenous peoples of the area from the Middle Bronze Age through to Greek colonisation. In doing so, the authors demonstrate a deep past of adoption and adaption of foreign products and trends in pottery long before Greek colonisation, offering readers a thorough chronology of this development in the Sybaritide region, and highlighting how important it is to understand the history of production, development and cultural engagement of an area when it comes to studies of pre-Roman Italy. This sentiment is a poignant one to end the volume on.

Unlike its sister volume, there is no closing or reflective chapter to round off the volume. Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder compare and differentiate the present volume from its sister in their introduction, and I would have appreciated a postscript, reflecting on how the cultural groups under analysis engaged in cultural exchange. Having said that, it is welcome to see each of these chapters prioritise the human element, as promised in Chapter 1. While Armstrong and Cohen’s volume makes for an accessible introduction to the topic, comparatively this volume serves as a more specialised guide for those more interested or experienced in the use of archaeological methodologies. Together, I found these volumes engaging, successful in their efforts to find resolution between the historical and archaeological records, and an invigorating view into the future of the discipline.

Bernard’s Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy focuses on the concept that studying ‘historical culture’ has the potential to move us beyond history as the recording in writing of historical events in the style of Herodotus and incorporates a broader set of social and cultural engagements in the recording, building and memorialising of the past. Building on recent trends in archaeology, history and anthropology, the introduction proposes that the emergence of urban societies in Iron Age Italy brought with it transformations in modes of historical thinking, which are both developments worth exploring and useful when emphasising that the later Roman ‘trajectory of cultural development and their turn towards written history was anything but obvious’ (p. 2).

Chapter 2, ‘Ancestors’, focuses on tombs and burial complexes of early Iron Age settlements, exploring the space and memories attached to these places as ‘bearers of historical meaning’ (p. 32). Bernard argues that burials went beyond generating collective memory, highlighting the critical role that genealogy and ancestry played in the construction of society. In doing so, the spaces and memories associated with burials and tombs reveal a form of historical culture, to which Bernard applies the term ‘anthropomorphic history’. This historical culture, in which social relationships are ‘mainly understood as relationships to celebrated women or men in the past’, is adopted from the work of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose work opens the book and influences Bernard quite directly (pp. 1, 35). It is this chapter that best delivers on Bernard’s promise of a broad geographic approach and attention given to historical temporal contexts without letting them define the flow of the text, as examples contrast and complement one another in engaging ways, encouraging readers to reflect on the evidence as they encounter it. This exercise is not just intellectually rewarding, but visually engaging and, at times, exciting.

Chapter 3, ‘Cities’, argues that Italy’s first urban communities were thinking about their pasts long before the arrival of Greek colonists. Offering something of a chronological sequel to Chapter 2, Bernard shows that elites worked to incorporate those uses of the past associated with the space and memory of early Iron Age burials into a new, broader civic construction, which leveraged the (dis)continuity of space and spatial elements as historical memory. It is interesting to see the two extremes on display here in Iron Age Italy, with collectives of families or communities placing historical memory and power in a space due to long continuity just as they were able to frame the breaking of tradition and occupation (either through the reworking of a space, its obliteration or the removal to a new space) as an explicit rebirth and refoundation of space.

Chapter 4, ‘Founders’, stands in contrast to Chapter 2 by exploring founders as ‘public historical individuals’ (p. 122), in opposition to the ‘private’ embodied by ancestors. Here Bernard demonstrates that founders and foundation myths were grafted onto existing historical cultures of Italy, rather than being inspired in the first instance by Greek myth-making, using archaeological evidence to ‘move below this dense stratum of Greek influence’ (p. 122) and to unearth existing Italian practices commemorating founding figures onto which Greek modes of constructing a mythic past were mapped. The chapter investigates the presence of Aeneas across Latium in pursuit of this argument and makes good use of comparing key sites of Latium (Veii, Tarquinia, early Rome) to those that ‘straddle’ the Greek and Italian spheres (Selinunte, Poseidonia). While Bernard maintains focus on Italian sites throughout the work, with reference to Greek colonies of Magna Graecia as comparanda, the discussions of Selinunte and Poseidonia as cities that straddle both Greek and Italian worlds are particularly instructive in their highlighting of founders in Italian settlements.

Building on from Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 5, ‘Time’, explores ancestral time and calendrical time not as opposites or in conflict, but as two configurations of historical culture in Iron Age Italy, each with its own consequences for how history is reckoned and recorded. In doing so, Bernard argues that the development of calendrical time was in part facilitated through elites navigating and maintaining their authority, as more complex sociopolitical formations and urbanisation brought with it a need for multiple groups of people to have a shared understanding of the passage and cyclical nature of time. One of the chapter’s strengths lies in its engagement with various Italic languages, which gives the work a wider holistic approach towards Iron Age Italic constructions of time, resulting in Bernard identifying a link between urban temple-based religion, political power and constructions of time, which broadly follows the trajectory of urbanisation in Italy and demonstrates the creation of calendrical timekeeping as fundamental to early Italian urbanism and fundamentally different to (though not in conflict with) that of pre-Iron Age ancestral time.

Chapter 6, ‘Images’, explores the novel forms of Italian historical burial culture that begin to appear in the fourth century bce. Bernard seeks, and succeeds, in placing the popularity of historical imagery at Rome within a wider context of use and engagement with the format across Italy – far from the domain of victors and Roman exceptionalism, Bernard demonstrates how historical imagery was employed as ‘the local expression of societal forces like group formation or urbanization’ (p. 223). What follows is an engaging walk through the emergence of pictorial history in Iron Age Italy, beginning with some of the most compelling material in Etruria (i.e. the François tomb at Vulci) before expanding scope to Campania, Daunia and Apulia. As with Chapter 5, Bernard must be commended for the engagement with non-Latin Italian languages. Taking a holistic approach to the evidence is no easy undertaking, and such an addition goes a long way to delivering on the book’s promise of ‘Historical Culture of Iron Age Italy’, rather than ‘Historical Culture of Iron Age Rome and Friends’. By way of a chronological conclusion, Bernard uses these case studies to demonstrate the continuation of the long-term shift from family- to city-based political structures and to show that from the fourth century civic participation had taken a prime role in granting individuals status in their communities. The chapter makes for an engaging read in tandem with Armstrong and Cohen’s Chapter 8 (Peruzzi) and Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder’s Chapter 12 (Heuer), allowing for an expansive view into the ways in which contemporary expressions of cultural identity manifest in different forms of evidence.

Chapter 7, ‘Conclusions’, wraps up the work and reminds readers of what Bernard has firmly delivered – a book that focuses on Italy rather than just Rome; a book that embraces a wider definition of ‘history-making’; and a book that demonstrates that Rome’s love affair with historiography and written narrative was a product of all that which came before.

Throughout, Bernard contends with two intertwined ideas – of the transition from ancestral time to civic time, and from familial communities to urbanised communities – while contending a body of evidence predominantly generated by an ancestral elite and/or aristocratic authority. While there is room to think on how non-elites engaged in the creation of historical culture in Iron Age Italy, the text is not made the worse for its lack, as it was these same elites who had the presence and social capital to shape the historical culture discussed in the text. While in some capacity we must contend with history (written and archaeological) being written by the winners, I believe Bernard has delivered on the closing wish: ‘My hope is that this study has cast new light on earlier forms of Italian historical culture as an independent and rich tradition in their own right’ (p. 263). Bernard’s attitude throughout the text of proposing new ways of thinking while pointing out spaces and lines of thought over which to exercise caution is by no means a new approach, but it is a very welcome one. Bernard works to demonstrate the utility of inference and interpretation to those readers who may feel at unease with the application of theory, and to my eyes he succeeds. There are some chapters (Chapter 6 chief among them) that would have benefited from colour figures, but the lack thereof does not undermine the argument. The prose reads smoothly, and the book is organised thematically, with the chapters complementing and building on one another, but also functioning on their own.

At the core of the dialogues between these works under review, stemming from the 2020 ‘Exchanging Ideas’ conference, there is a natural feeling and, no doubt, hard-earned continuation of discussions the discipline has been having for decades. Building upon those works and topics that have become cornerstones of that discourse (Corrupting Seas; connectivities and globalisations, identities), these works’ biggest success is in the implementation of post-colonial theory and perspectives, and the reminder of a critical element sometimes lost in these discussions – that all of these dynamics at play rest in the hands of people, and that the lives and lived experiences of ancient peoples shaped connectivities at all levels.

Each of the works discussed is well produced. Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder is the only volume to include colour illustrations, and the chapters therein benefit from it. Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists working on identities of all stripes will find these volumes enlightening, with Bernard’s book and Armstrong and Cohen’s volume being a little more accessible to non-specialised readers than Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder (though the latter’s engagement with more data-driven case studies is sure to delight those more archaeologically inclined). For those interested in holistic approaches to the evidence, Bernard in tandem with Chapter 1 of Armstrong and Cohen and Chapters 2–4 of Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder make for good methodological role models. For those teaching identity and connectivity at the intersection of archaeology and historiography, I recommend including Chapters 1, 2 and 11 of Armstrong and Cohen, Chapter 1 of Armstrong and Rhodes-Schroder, and Chapter 1 of Bernard in reading lists, with all other chapters providing engaging case studies for interested parties and research students alike.