This volume, edited by Heather Law Pezzarossi and Russell Sheptak, is a welcome addition to a growing body of established scholarship about Indigeneity in the colonized Americas. It consists of 10 chapters written by a group of scholars who collectively use innovative approaches and conceptual frameworks to study Indigenous sites spanning the deeper past, more recent, and contemporary Indigenous communities. The editors write that the authors' theoretical and methodological approaches “create better bridges between past and present” (p. 2). The case studies reveal prolonged Indigenous entanglements and precolonial continuities framed in ways that are more representative of Indigenous experiences and lifeways than selective foci on “contact” events. The best examples of this are Kurt Jordan and Peregrine Gerard-Little's (Chapter 3) study of Seneca use of space through time, and Lindsay Montgomery's (Chapter 6) evidence for Comanche reterritorialization. The book's editors also offer the advantage of reframing perseverance or cultural persistence in ways that consciously eschew questions about authenticity and legitimacy, given that these ideas were colloquially used to disenfranchise, erase, delegitimize, or otherwise deny Indigenous descendant communities their cultural identities. With consideration of a set of concepts (e.g., residence, sovereignty) that contribute to Native self-determination, the contributors’ approaches actively contribute to the larger project of decolonizing the discipline.

The themes described in the introductory chapter are woven throughout subsets of subsequent case studies. The first concerns authenticity—in other words, an explicit recognition of Native peoples’ inherent rights to define Indigeneity for themselves. At the same time, the authors recognize the great variety of circumstances and challenges under which different Indigenous groups found themselves—from direct territorial constraints to freedom of movement and self-determination outside of imposed colonial control. The case studies in the book do illustrate how groups under different kinds and degrees of political constraints adopted movement and territoriality strategies to support their persistence. Peter Nelson's (Chapter 9) use of charmstones and other material indications of Coast Miwok activities around Tolay Lake in California, as well as Kay Scaramelli and Franz Scaramelli's (Chapter 8) argument about refusal of claimed colonial power over a landscape, are excellent examples. In a similar vein, practical survivance tactics, archaeologically identifiable strategies or practices used to facilitate long-term persistence, are powerful ways to interpret patterns in space and over time. For example, Sheptak (Chapter 2) explores how the Masca in Honduras re-created their pueblo as a collection of houses, church, groves, and planted fields each time they moved, and how they used these features in legal documents as a form of place making. Guido Pezzarossi's interpretation of colonial Mayan economic shifts in Guatemala (Chapter 4) similarly challenges the concept of continuity.

Significant attention is paid to the paired concepts of movement and territorialization, which are cleverly tied to survivance of cultural practices and identities in several case studies in the book. For example, Lee Panich (Chapter 7) explores the movement of missionized Native peoples into and out of California colonial sites during the postsecularization period while maintaining autonomous use of a variety of material goods, including both those with precontact antecedents (e.g., obsidian) and those without (e.g., flaked glass). In a similar vein, Law Pezzarossi (Chapter 5) takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the stratigraphic layers of her excavation of a Nipmuc household in Massachusetts and the material “anachronisms” that emerged. In the process, she convincingly argues for a different understanding of Native persistence.

In sum, the authors’ collective work demonstrates how archaeology can consciously contribute to Indigenous peoples’ survivance against long-term processes and attempts to subordinate them. The material indications of Indigenous community members’ persistence during periods when—according to colonial narratives—they no longer existed are used again and again to demonstrate how “continuity is a historical product of change” (p. 188). Rosemary Joyce's discussion (Chapter 10) takes this reframing even further in tying Indigeneity throughout the Americas as described in the case studies to cosmopolitanism. In doing so, she convincingly argues that the authors provide a critical correction to archaeologies of colonialism as documentation of inherent loss: the loss of authentic Indigenous lifeways, identities, ideologies, and materialities.