The volume The Diversity of Hunter-Gatherer Pasts is the output of the eponymous session at the eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHaGS11) held in Vienna in 2015. The publication contains twelve chapters and is divided into two thematic sections: ‘Patterns of Diversity and Change’ (Section 1) and ‘Diversity, Comparisons and Analogies’ (Section 2). The first, introductory chapter is written by book editors Bill Finlayson and Graeme Warren (Ch. 1) where they stress the two excellent and ambitious main aims of the book, ‘firstly, to foreground diversity across time and space and secondly, to consider how diversity affects our use of analogy and comparative analysis’ (p. 2). Fundamentally, these aims were met rather successfully as the volume encompasses a broad geographic as well as temporal scope. In terms of chronology, the volume spans from the Middle Palaeolithic to hunter-gatherers of the ethnographic present. In terms of spatial coverage, many different regions such as the north-western coast of North America, Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, Central Africa, northern Japan, and sub-tropical Asia are all represented. However, most importantly, the book provides a significant input to the discussion of the applicability of analogy based on ethnographic hunter-gatherers in archaeological exploratory and explanatory models. This contribution is significant precisely because most—perhaps all—archaeologists researching past hunter-gatherers are drawing on analogous reasoning to a smaller or greater extent.

Yet, it is often argued that the use of supposed analogies based on ethnographic observations cannot be applied to any given archaeological case in a straightforward manner: after all, all ethnographically known hunter-gatherers likely have themselves a long history of contact with agricultural or even state-levels societies, are often deeply intertwined with colonial histories, and are in that sense merely one end-member in a spectrum of modern lifeways. These reservations are not new but some of the chapters question the effectiveness of using ethnographic analogies for the periods when the world was inhabited only by hunter-gatherers with novel angles. Chapters 2, 5, and 6 provide useful case studies of hunter-gatherers’ cultural diversity through time and space. In Chapter 2, Colin Grier reflects on the key organisational principles of the Coast Salish hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Coast of North America. His evidence is rich and, in focusing on elements such as long-term construction of place, ownership, and the maintenance of economic diversity, proprietorship, and local autonomy, he provides an example of just how complex hunter-gatherer lifeways can be.

In Chapter 3, Kathryn de Luna also interrogates historical research aspects, in particular assumptions related to economic transitions among the Botatwe speakers in Central Africa. Through historical linguistic analysis, she reconstructs the intellectual history of subsistence in a situation where farming communities introduced bush hunting in the eighth to thirteenth centuries. This practice is associated with particular terms, labels, and definitions, indicating that there was no clear dichotomy between food procurement and food production. Chapter 3 is the least archaeological of all in this volume, but also provides a different and fresh perspective on what other kinds of data can be used in making inferences about the past.

Mark Hudson's Chapter 5 offers the example of the remarkable hunter-gatherers of northern Japan, during the early Common Era. He discusses the relationship between peripheral hunter-gatherer groups and a political centre in this Japanese early historic Iron Age setting. Hudson's chapter does a great service in the sense that Japanese archaeology still remains comparatively little known to scholars elsewhere. Thanks to early written records as well as an exceptional archaeological record, Hudson can thickly describe an early contact scenario between state-level societies and marine hunter-gatherer-fisher groups. At the same time, Hudson explores the tricky issue of combining such written testimonies with the archaeological data and how the frames and framings of historians and archaeologists often are at odds.

Chapter 6 by Jordi Estévez and Alfredo Prieto discusses how two different hunter-gatherer groups coped with similar challenges in different ways; they show that contingency plays a role in shaping the adaptations of these past communities. They compare two forager communities living in geographically distant but, from an environmental perspective, arguably rather similar regions: Tierra Del Fuego and the Northwest Coast of North America. Both of the societies at one point faced a major subsistence crisis when an important staple food—mussels—declined substantially. The hunter-gatherer community at Tierra Del Fuego became smaller and fell below a new demographic threshold vis-à-vis this modified carrying capacity, while the foragers of the Northwest Coast intensified and diversified the exploitation of resources. The ways these two societies coped with the crisis influenced their further social development significantly—an argument not unlike that made for the classic case of the transitition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in southern Scandinavia (Rowley-Conwy, Reference Rowley-Conwy1984)—and the comparison provided in Chapter 6 stands as an interesting and powerful one with an ambition to transcend apparent oppositions between particularist and generalising approaches to hunter-gatherer adpatations.

Many if not all of the chapters in this volume touch upon issues of research history and on how our intellectual baggage scaffolds contemporary approaches to hunter-gatherer archaeology. This is clearly an important aspect related to the analytical use of analogy and comparison. Chapter 7, by Reinhard Blumauer, is another call to remember this not always entirely comfortable academic past, albeit not in relation to the usual suspects of Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward B. Tylor, Lewis Binford, and company. Instead, he takes a closer look at the largely forgotten paradigm of the Vienna School founded by Wilhelm Schmidt at the beginning of the twentieth century. Given the location of the conference that originally gave rise to this volume, this is a most welcome contribution.

Penny Spikins, Gail Hitchens, and Andy Needham (Ch. 9), for instance, take us back to the deep past when Europe was inhabited by Neanderthals and provide observations from the archaeological data suggesting a substantially different social organization among this prehistoric hominin group than those observed in any ethnographic analogies. A similar opinion is voiced by Bill Finlayson in Chapter 4 who also stresses that there are no direclty analogous examples among ethnographic hunter-gatherers to prehistoric times when the world was inhabited by forager societies only, nor for the unique moment in human prehistory when, for the first time, the major transformation from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists took place at the end of the Late Pleistocene in southwest Asia. To this roster we can add the many situations in which foragers colonised land area that never before had seen humans. Archaeology is, he argues, in a priviliged position to provide an understanding of these scenarios.

In order to investigate just how analogy and comparative analysis are used Graeme Warren reviews, in Chapter 10, two important recent publications on the Mesolithic—‘Mesolithic Horizons’ (McCartan et al., Reference McCartan, Woodman, Schulting and Warren2009) and ‘Mesolithic Europe’ (Bailey et al., Reference Bailey and Spikins2008)—with the specific aim of teasing out just how analogy is used in these publications. His assessment shows that the bulk of analogies and comparisons made in these volumes refer to generalised models of hunter-gatherers grounded, most commonly, in the works of Binford (Reference Binford2001) or Kelly (Reference Kelly1995). Warren concludes that new or at least different models or analogies should be developed in order to arrive at a more complete understanding of Late Glacial and Mesolithic societies. Chapter 8, by Robert Carracedo-Recasens and Albert García-Piquer, and Chapter 11, by Jana Fortier and Paul Goldstein, could be mentioned alongside Warren's admonition to employ ethnographic data supported by analytical studies and grounded analogies: Carracedo-Recasens and García-Piquer discuss social inequality and gender differences between females and males among Yamana foragers in Tierra del Fuego. They combine ethnographic and archaeological data with an innovative experimental ethnoarchaeological study and agent-based modelling. Fortier and Goldstein discuss the Raute foragers of sub-tropical Asia—they are surprisingly little known among archaeologists given the wealth and detail of the linguistic, ethno-historical, and genetic information available—and their value as analogues for prehistoric hunter-gatherer studies. Finally, Paul Lane provides a succinct summary and insightful comments of his own in Chapter 12.

In sum, Finlayson and Warren's fine edited volume The Diversity of Hunter-Gatherer Pasts is in many ways a classic example of an edited book arising from a conference session: a plethora of contributions from many different researchers presenting diverse perspectives and datasets. All the authors make an effort to genuinely relate their research to the overarching topic of the book and each of the twelve chapters provides insightful research-historical observations, well-investigated case studies, or substantive theoretical discussions of past hunter-gatherer diversity. By the same token, and as with so many conference proceedings, the chapters in The Diversity of Hunter-Gatherer Pasts do nonetheless vary in their thematic consistency. Diversity is the keyword here, not only in relation to the diversity of past hunter-gatherer lifeways but also to the content of this volume. This is its strength and at the same time its weakness: twelve chapters can hardly cover the full breadth of either hunter-gatherer pasts nor of our many different theoretical and methodological ways of understanding these. Subliminally at least, this volume appears to argue against the use of analogies as general frames for understanding patterns in the hunter-gatherer past. In reality, however, productively employing ethnographic analogies for understanding past cultural behaviours needs not to be framed in a qualitative/quantitative antagonism. Both approaches can be useful and, fortunately, philosophers of science have been turning their attention to this topic recently. Currie (Reference Currie2016), for instance, has shown that there is no substantive difference between the so-called comparative method in evolutionary biology and the use of ethnographic analogy in hunter-gatherer archaeology. The ways in which such epistemological and methodological comparisons may be able to further stimulate the debate on ethnographic analogy in hunter-gatherer archaeology should, in our opinion, be further explored. One noteworthy difference between the comparative method in evolutionary biology and the use of ethnographic analogy in archaeology is that biologists have derived an extensive and largely quantitative apparatus and many substantive databases that allow them to make epistemologically robust comparisons. It is arguably against this background of general comparisons that we may be able to detect truly different, non-analogue ‘palaeo-societal’ constellations among past hunter-gatherers, a topic that is now only beginning to be explored in depth and in relation to similarly non-analogue palaeo-ecological constellations (e.g. Riede & Pedersen, Reference Riede and Pedersen2018).

It is a truism that archaeology has privileged access to some of the major events and processes of the human past, including the initial transition from a world of hunter-gatherers to one in which other societal and economic constellations existed, and from a world without many neighbours to one where fences and fortresses dominate. This privilege, does not, however, translate automatically into appropriate methodologies for studying these transitions. Understanding both patterns and processes, uniqueness and generality, requires attention to detail and to historical contingencies but also attention to larger-scale differences and similarities. The enjoyable and well-written if perhaps a tad under-illustrated volume The Diversity of Hunter-Gatherer Pasts provides a solid body of evidence for taking these debates forward.