During the last 20 years, Adam Smith has emerged as a top intellect in archaeology. He has written two major books that present a consistent theoretical position that considers how to apply post-processual thought to complex political formations in pre-modern societies. With its novel approach to authority, his first book, The political landscape: constellations of authority in early comparative complex polities (2003), has proven pivotal for landscape studies in archaeology. It is an exciting comparative analysis of political institutions from the New and Old Worlds. As he envisions it, the present book is a companion to the first, discussing more broadly the ‘political instrumentality’ of objects in complex societies. He focuses on the Caucasus, where he has worked, in order to consider in depth a single region in the long term.

The political machine is divided into two major parts: Part I is a theoretical overview of the post-modern literature on sovereignty and materiality as related to objects. Part II summarises in three chapters—one for each phase of the Bronze Age—how sovereignty developed in the Caucasus. A very short conclusion forms a thought piece on archaeology in modern politics. The coherence and brevity of the book reflects its development from the 2013 Rostovtzeff Lecture Series at New York University. The book can be read quickly, and its significance for evolutionary studies can be assimilated thoughtfully. It deserves to be read broadly by academics, graduate students and an interested public.

Part I provides an excellent theoretical overview of sovereignty and material culture. Smith envisions a political machine composed of both intended strategies crafted by an emerging elite and unintended operations created by everyday life, connections with objects and emotional engagements of the general population. As he develops his own post-modern approach to social history, he attacks the outmoded emphasis on typology as used formally in archaeology. Although most theoretically oriented archaeologists already consider the use of typologies as a settled issue (i.e. typologies are artificial constructs that collapse the real variability that we want to study), Smith adds significantly to an emphasis on how dynamic material processes helped form traditional political systems. The review of the literature covers many familiar and some unfamiliar works that broadened my understanding of the political process. A few key concepts stand out. First is sovereignty, which is well discussed but not clearly defined by Smith. I expected that sovereignty demands a sovereign or a government with absolute powers, but the post-modern (anti-typological) use of the term recognises a much more complicated (and realistic) understanding of balanced and contested powers and processes linked to sovereignty. Second is the concept of a public, which reflects Lincoln's famous phrase describing the American ‘government of the people, for the people, and by the people’. The people (or public) are, therefore, conceived of as a group with strong affiliations to a polity or association of polities, akin to the tribe. Here, Benedict Anderson's idea of ‘imagined communities’ would seem particularly relevant, although his work is discussed only in passing. Smith emphasises that publics are created by bottom-up identity politics through engagement with common material objects. Third is warfare, long identified with state formation, whereby physical intimidation establishes an unstable regional political order. Fourth is the actual building of an institutional apparatus of governance that involves the development of systems of distancing (what Richard Blanton calls ‘exclusionary’ strategies) and of legitimacy. Smith also introduces a series of processes, which he labels sensibility (flows, transubstantiation), sense (metamorphosis, transfiguration) and sentiment. Although I rather like the literary reference to Jane Austen, the use of such terminology would seem more appropriate to theology than to materialist studies in archaeology.

In Part II, Smith uses the theoretical concepts developed in the previous part to present the archaeological sequence for the Bronze Age in the Caucasus. His research here provides a substantial addition to our knowledge of the archaeological record. Although the presentation is necessarily brief, it affords a useful introduction to the region's Bronze Age sequence. I, and probably many archaeologists, would have preferred a more systematic presentation of the evidence, using tables and more detailed settlement maps, but the chosen level of detail is adequate to develop the ideas that are central to the book. In fact, more detail would have narrowed the audience and limited the book's potential impact. Part II looks at three sequential, organising structures: ‘the civilisation machine’, involving the identity of a public in the Early Bronze Age; ‘the war machine’, involving new strategies of intimidation and spatial extension in the Middle Bronze Age; and ultimately the ‘political machine’ in the Late Bronze Age, when the institutional order of governance was formalised. Smith's analysis makes clear that certain organisational prerequisites were built upon to create a functioning political system, and that this phased making of institutions involved a continual reimagining of order.

As many readers know, I am a second-generation processual archaeologist with a firm commitment to studying social evolution. Does The political machine represent a replacement reality to processual studies? I do not think so. With the perspective of my age, perhaps, I have come to realise that the major theories of anthropology, archaeology and history are rarely in opposition to each other. They appear to offer more of a heterodoxy that addresses different issues of change and stability. Although I found Adam Smith's intellectual and evidential argument compelling, I saw nothing that should lead to a rejection of the research agenda of the political economy and broader processual approaches. Even though we are working on different processes from different perspectives, I think that these theoretical approaches ultimately prove to complement each other. Archaeology as a discipline investigates the combined processes of social change and reproduction, recognising that change is not unilinear or predetermined. Rather, at multiple scales of social relations and institutions, prehistory surely involved diverse historical processes of people making their lives from the bottom up, and leaders trying to exert power from the top down.