The central focus of the contributions to Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen's Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies is how indigenous people of the early colonial Americas interacted with foreign material goods. Whereas substantial earlier work examined long-term changes in material culture in colonial settings, few books have specifically taken the adoption or circulation of novel foreign goods and the value systems that they enact and enable as the central focus of study. Geographically, the essays that make up the volume cover large swaths of the “circum-Caribbean macro-region” (11), which includes much of the Caribbean islands and adjacent areas of North, Central, and South America. Temporally, they cover the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, which includes Spanish, English, Dutch, and French colonial expeditions, although the vast majority of the chapters specifically focuses on the very first encounters with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. What the contributors capture so effectively, however, are the complex cultural interactions that many Amerindian populations had with one another both prior to and in the decades following initial European colonization. For many places discussed in the chapters, foreign goods were not just European products, but included items from places like what is now central Mexico, mainland South America, and Africa. What is always striking in reading a book on the topic of early colonial encounters is just how far and wide people traveled, and had already been traveling, before any Europeans stepped onto the scene. Chapters by Martijn van den Bel and Gérard Collomb, Hofman and colleagues, and Clay Mathers, on the Guyanas, Lesser Antilles, and what is now the US Southwest, respectively, perhaps best illustrate the intricacies and impacts of local indigenous geopolitics.

Many of the contributors emphasize the variable ways that indigenous peoples adopted and used foreign material culture. The authors do an excellent job conveying that different kinds of contact situations had different impacts. Somewhat infrequent or peaceful exchange relationships were less charged milieus that created more seamless incorporation of foreign materials into indigenous material culture repertoires. According to Mary Jane Berman and Perry Gnivecki, this is what seemed to have happened in the Bahamas, for example, between the Spanish and native Lucayans. More intense, more frequent, more violent, larger-scale, and terrestrial (overland) contact campaigns often resulted in distinct relationships between colonizers and European material culture. Across the Americas, Europeans at least initially traded or gifted similar sets of goods to Amerindians—typically iron metal tools and gift kit items such as beads and bells. However, the ways that indigenous peoples incorporated and used these items depended in part on the nature of their subsequent interaction with Europeans and their existing indigenous political systems. In areas where indigenous political systems relied in part on access to luxury goods and systems of prestige, European material culture items often ended up in elite burial contexts or elite contexts, but this was by no means universal or uniform. Sometimes items fit especially well within local material culture repertoires and cosmovision. However, more often than not, especially in places where the contact was short-lived, amicable, or somewhat indirect, European items were easily incorporated, were not modified, and were discarded alongside similar kinds of items.

Several of the authors explore how indigenous material culture production changed because of exposure to foreign material culture. Overall, these studies show that the technologies of manufacture were slower to change than vessel forms or design elements. For example, in sixteenth-century central Mexico, Gilda Hernández Sánchez shows that indigenous potters easily adopted new forms and design elements from European vessels, while technological attributes (construction techniques) remained stable through time. Despite having been introduced to the pottery wheel, it was never adopted for local ceramic manufacture. Likewise, Marlieke Ernst and Hofman argue that local potters in Hispaniola continued to make pottery using local methods, but added new African and European design elements and vessel forms. In both central Mexico and El Salvador, pottery remained largely indigenous in style for many decades. William Fowler and Jeb Card show that what emerged in El Salvador were new creolized forms that were neither Spanish imitations nor pre-Hispanic holdovers. Discussing the Lesser Antilles, Hofman and colleagues argue that earthenware traditions remained relatively stable in spite of ever-shifting cultural formations. Importantly, Russell Sheptak and Rosemary Joyce demonstrate that novel forms of material culture emerged because of Spanish colonialism in Honduras, obsidian dart points, and ditch and palisade wall construction styles, signaling that exposure to foreign material culture in colonial situations sometimes created novel “diagnostic” artifacts that are neither foreign nor introduced.

As with any edited volume, the book is uneven at times. The strongest chapters are those that most closely aligned with the volume's theme in examining the ways that European goods were received and used by local indigenous peoples and how local indigenous material culture was affected by exposure to European material culture. Together, these studies help to demonstrate the impact of the variable nature of colonial encounters—the frequency, scale, and disposition—not only on the ways in which foreign goods entered into indigenous material culture systems, but also on their reception and use. Importantly, Hofman and Keehnen did an excellent job keeping indigenous voices front and center, such that the Amerindian perspective is ultimately, and rightly, foregrounded. I especially appreciated the color illustrations, and the useful map in the opening chapter helped to place all of the case studies and graphically organize the text. This attention to detail helped to ground the volume and hold it together such that I could imagine myself being in the conference room where these essays were shared.