Decades since its formalization in the 1950s and 1960s, the field of historical archaeology has increasingly become a multistoried and multisited endeavor, juggling vastly different perspectives, varied timescapes, and diverse theoretical groundings, with an authentic relevancy to serve the needs of the present. Historical archaeology's greatest strengths have often been exemplified in the exploration of subaltern groups and suppressed histories. For example, African diaspora archaeology has produced powerful insights and emotional truths. When confronting such troubled pasts, this revelatory research is foregrounded in the notion that not all histories are heroic, and archaeologies of these times and places must work to reveal old wrongs and to excavate old grief.

Paul Mullins, an innovator in the field since the 1990s, has produced in this study a truly remarkable document. Its title, Revolting Things, is appropriate and telling; as Mullins puts it, this work “examines the confluence of revulsion and materiality” (p. 2). Examining aspects of dark heritage and dark tourism, Mullins offers us a tour of a myriad hidden sites—or public sites with hidden pasts—in the American and European landscapes. In seven succinct chapters, the book reveals a series of often harrowing events; for example, Chapter 1 begins with a 1901 Black lynching as public performance and horrible spectacle.

Other chapters include a critical analysis of Confederate memorials in varied forms, including a vignette of the bones of Robert E. Lee's horse, which were bizarrely on display until 1963. A history of the racist underpinnings of these memorials’ generation, and their rapid deconstruction in current times, is offered. Sites of racist violence against Black bodies, such as race riots and lynchings, form the basis of a subsequent chapter, which details key events. It interrogates this past through certain well-chosen themes, such as the creation of public lynching photographs, which were used not only as shocking photojournalism to document these atrocities in the pages of the Crisis magazine (among other legitimate publications) but as the creation and proliferation of notorious penny postcards of these mangled human remains, which served as macabre souvenirs to denigrate the dead and to venerate the murders—and which were sold to an eager white public in the thousands.

A subsequent chapter deals literally with the corpses of villains, the process of their obliteration, and subsequent politicization and memorialization. Focusing on such high-ranking Nazis as Rudolph Hess, Mullins documents the attempts at ablution by the Allied powers and the German government through private burial of his body, and the rise of right-wing Neo-Nazis, who have struggled to venerate this past ethos through idolism and memorialization. Other chapters concern the construction of the American (and typically white) dream of single-family homes and postwar communities in the twentieth century, and the silencing and actual destruction of African American history and tangible heritage on these same landscapes. It additionally details structural racism impacting Black communities—all underwritten, taxpayer funded, and boosted by municipal, state, and federal policies. The final chapter details the singular story of James Cameron, a Black survivor of a lynching that took the lives of his codefendants accused of the murder of a white family in 1931 Indiana, and his efforts at creating a memorial to the victims of lynching nationwide. After the varied and eclectic topics covered in previous chapters, the final chapter is a riveting story of singular focus.

The book is exceedingly well written, handsomely produced, and profusely illustrated. Few single works can boast such varied views as a portrait of the Nazi Rudolph Hess, the articulated skeleton of General Lee's horse, and John Wilkes Booth's boot. In particular, these black-and-white images have a clarity that have been lacking in recent books from some academic presses, including the publisher of this book.

This work is so many different things, in fact, that it cannot be adequately described in this venue, but it is clearly not a traditional archaeological study, grounded in a singular site, historical background, excavation, material culture analysis, and synthesis. It is indisputably an archaeology, because its subject matter is material culture examined in historical and cultural context, but it is not a conventional study in that sense. Like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities, Mullins brings to his audience a potpourri of diverse and at times jarring sites, concepts, and actions, both past and present. But unlike a true Victorian-era cabinet, there are continuous threads that link these places and actions together to form an organic whole while simultaneously serving multiple audiences and achieving what I believe is a true engagement with present and presumably future generations.