Conceptualising, interrogating and interpreting spatial data has long been a fundamental component of archaeological inquiry. Spatial analysis—the application of a wide range of statistical, environmental and behavioural models to explore patterns and relationships in geostatistical data—is one of the fastest moving subfields in archaeology. Archaeological spatial analysis serves as a welcome snapshot of the state of the field, highlighting and exploring key methodologies, while also considering new developments and avenues of progress. The editors are interested in promoting critical spatial thinking in archaeology, as their introductory chapter makes clear. This chapter charts the development of spatial inquiry in archaeology from early distribution maps, through the formalisation of spatial analysis in the 1970s, the injection of post-processual thought in the 1980s, the appearance of GIS in the 1990s, and the last two decades of increasingly rapid development in both statistical and experiential modes of spatial analysis. This historical review serves as a foundation for understanding the development of contemporary methodologies. The spatial thinking promoted in this volume prioritises theoretical grounding, critical and careful selection and use of methodologies, and—most importantly—highlights the fact that these analyses rarely answer particular research questions on their own, and are instead meant to guide and inform interpretive processes.

What follows are 23 chapters by 30 contributors, all of whom were asked to: 1) introduce a particular technique, theme or methodology associated with spatial analysis; 2) deploy one or more case studies as a means of illustrating the topic at hand, either alone or as part of a larger workflow; and 3) conclude with future directions or new applications. While the structure of each contribution is clear and generally effective, their order within the volume itself is more enigmatic. For example, Archaeological spatial analysis begins with an excellent chapter (2) by Gupta (one of only four female contributors) on data quality, the organisation of spatial databases, and open science in archaeology, all with the aim of increasing reproducibility and collaboration. Yet similar themes are not addressed again until Green's chapter (22), centred on ‘big data’ in archaeology. More troubling than the distance between these chapters within the volume is the range of disparate approaches that they advocate without directly communicating with one another. Green provides a case study that encourages the use of ‘dirty data’, which are processed with proprietary black-box analytical packages found in consumer GIS software, but he does not acknowledge any of the correctives or open-source measures advanced by Gupta. The volume as a whole would have benefitted from additional open discourse between similar chapters—exploring how concepts proposed in one could inform methods deployed in another—as well as a more coherent organisational strategy. Division into subsections along thematic, methodological or scalar lines would have been pertinent. Moreover, Archaeological spatial analysis concludes without any sort of epilogue serving to unite the contributions further and encourage the next steps in the development of spatial analysis as an archaeological subfield.

One strength of Archaeological spatial analysis is found in the contributions focused on exploring specific methodologies, rather than broad themes. Highlighting each in turn falls outside the scope of this review, but Conolly's introduction to spatial interpolation (SI) is a prime example, providing an excellent balance of information, application and comparison. Conolly proposes a series of hypothetical research applications that each use an appropriate variant of the methodology for a specific purpose. He then explains three different methods of SI more thoroughly, highlights potential issues that readers may encounter in their own research and applies each method to the same dataset to exhibit variance in outputs and the importance of making an informed decision when selecting a method. The chapter concludes with two real-world case studies at different scales to highlight the efficacy of SI for a range of archaeological applications.

By contrast, chapters with much greater methodological or thematic purview do not benefit from following the structure suggested by the editors in their introduction. These thematic contributions end up as either extended literature reviews with little room for detailed applications, or instead focus on such a limited aspect of a given topic that they are neither comprehensive nor representative. While the inclusion of chapters on these broad themes may detract from the volume's aim to be a methodological guide, they nonetheless provide a welcome sense of the range of topics under the umbrella of spatial analyses and offer useful bibliographies.

The printed version of Archaeological spatial analysis includes an impressive 188 greyscale illustrations and 23 tables, all of which are placed near their corresponding references in the text. Coherent data visualisation is a key means of presenting the results of spatial analysis—although as Eve and Graham's contribution highlights, not the only one; encouraging clear and compelling representations of space is one of the major elements of spatial thinking that the editors of the volume advocate. Unfortunately, the physical volume is plagued by inconsistent image quality and occasionally illegible text. Only a handful of figures have been styled for greyscale reproduction. Many of the 64 figures reproduced as colour plates are resized at a smaller scale than their in-text equivalents. These plates are split into two unpaginated batches within the text, regrettably this means that figures in Chapter 13 that are designed to be viewed side by side, are instead separated by 155 pages. Captions do indicate whether a figure has been reproduced in colour, but they do not specify whether their colour plates are to be found in the former or latter group. Highlighting illustration concerns may seem like splitting hairs, but considering that results of the topics addressed in this volume are almost always displayed visually, the presentation of compelling graphics in a guide of this sort is as important as the careful articulation of the methodologies themselves.

Editorial concerns should not detract from the diverse contributions within Archaeological spatial analysis, however, nor the editors’ success in achieving the ambitious goals set out in the volume's introduction. Considering that spatial engagement permeates all aspects of archaeology, the wide range of topics covered in Archaeological spatial analysis offers something for everyone and will certainly be useful to instructors in archaeological GIS or spatial analytics. This is a theoretically and methodologically well-informed volume that will encourage readers to explore beyond those topics immediately relevant to their own work, exposing themselves to new concepts, models and ways of thinking spatially.