This book is an invitation to participate in the ongoing conversation among leading scholars about prehistoric processes of urbanization and social change. Equipped with the book, a pencil, and a tablet, you can work towards your personal ‘Dawn of History’ (title) and your ‘Axial Age’ (Ch. 1, p. 5; Ch. 12; Ch. 24, pp. 353 and 366) in understanding the transformations of non-literate complex societies (p. 7) around the middle of the first millennium bc from a multidisciplinary perspective. The pencil will allow you not only to highlight expressions, but also to add comments as well as illustrate your own ideas. It will also help identify and connect concepts between the eight parts and twenty-seven (!) chapters even better than through the index and cross-referencing. The tablet or any other means of geographical orientation will act as a guide on this tour, to the many sites and situations in and beyond Eurasia that serve as evidence and testing ground for questions emanating from, revolving around, and repeatedly returning to the renowned Heuneburg. This Early Iron Age settlement in south-western Germany—often called the ‘first city north of the Alps’ (p. 320)—is the co-editors’ archaeological ‘home’ and many authors refer to this site in their contributions. Knowledge and views held by archaeologists on the Heuneburg have exploded over the last decades (p. 4 and Ch. 22). This can be taken as a symbol of the mind-changing power and intention of this book. The global perspective hidden in it, both geographically and in terms of the discipline, is the invitation to an intellectual treasure hunt for everyone interested.

Back in 2013, it was an exhilarating experience to attend the conference on Individualization, Urbanization, and Social Differentiation in Stuttgart that was at the origin of this book (p. 6 and Hüglin, Reference Hüglin2013). The meeting was organized alongside the exhibition Die Welt der Kelten; the speakers were from all over the globe, and their presentations linked the Celts and the Swabian capital to the World (p. 17).

The volume's editors can be proud to include, among other ‘big names’, Colin Renfrew, Michael E. Smith, Jan Assmann, and John Bintliff, who help achieve the editors' aim to ‘make archaeological and ancient historical research more accessible for the broader discussion in the humanities and the social sciences’ (p. 9). The approaches of the authors in the eight parts of the book are very diverse, ranging from theoretical and methodological contributions to regional and style-specific case studies. The brilliant (both in style and content) introduction (Ch. 1) holds the book together and the many cross-references among the twenty-eight authors in the book make it highly enjoyable and encourage the reader to jump from one contribution to another. This diversity may indeed ‘attract and satisfy different types of readers’, as the editors hope (p. 9).

Unfortunately, this book will not reach the general public that flocked to the exhibition and bought so many of the catalogues illustrated in full colour. The latter, Die Welt der Kelten (Röber et al., Reference Röber, Jansen, Rau and von Nicolai2012), was sold out even before the end of the exhibition and it was difficult for the participants of the Stuttgart conference to obtain the last few copies. This brings me to the central weakness of the book: apart from the cover, it lacks visual appeal and the intuitive explanatory power of well-designed illustrations. Granted, it might be this publisher's style and make economic sense to print in black and white, but that does not excuse the lack of diligence with illustrations in general, such as figures that are too dark (e.g. fig. 1.1b, p. 4). It also does not excuse misspellings like ‘megathic yards’ in fig. 2.3 (p. 29). And my heart bleeds when I see excellent digital reconstructions of the Heuneburg architecture reproduced so poorly (p. 324, fig. 22.2). Were the book also available as an e-book, it would be possible to have colours there and it would make it easier to search and cite from the text. This lack of colour and graphics seems to mirror resentment among some academic publishers of compromising credibility by using the tools of popular media. So, we experience here on the one hand didactic dry letters, and black-and-white illustrations, when what the book describes on the other hand is a dramatic change in seeing, depicting, and positioning oneself in the world. Perhaps I underestimate our ability to visualize things for ourselves, but the process of producing good images is—for the author and the graphic designer—an additional act of translating and transforming, expressing and compressing signs into significant shapes. This translation into the visual world would unlock a new, perhaps more popular, way of communicating our research.

The fact that this book does not focus on a single topic is intriguing. It tackles a whole series of processes: individualization, urbanization, social differentiation, and looks at them in their complex interdependence on an ambitious spatial and chronological scale. It reflects the idea that major trends in human evolution materialize at a medium (human) level as well as at macro and micro levels. Manuel Fernández-Götz and Dirk Krausse explain in the introduction the underlying concept of materiality in the following way: ‘people create material culture while at the same time material culture creates them, making them who they are and conditioning the way they experience the world’ (p. 3). It is through this two-way transformation that archaeology and other disciplines study not only materials but also (human) minds from the past.

The archaeology of the mind, Renfrew‘s cognitive archaeology, does not seek to find out ‘what they thought’ but ‘how they thought’ (p. 24). This ‘how’ depends very much on the way people experience identity in the first place. Almudena Hernando stresses that ‘prehistoric identity was not like modern identity’ (p. 53). While today we experience mostly ‘individual identity’, people in prehistory would have had ‘communal or relational identities’. They would also not understand themselves as independent agents (p. 56) able to change or profit from change, which stands in total contradiction to our modern appreciation of, let alone obsession with, change and innovation (Bauman, Reference Baumann2012).

It is also in this sense that Bintliff condemns the ‘agency theory’ that was fashionable in archaeology during the 1980s under political regimes (like that of Margaret Thatcher) undoing the Welfare State and social solidarity, leaving the citizen as an isolated ‘consumer’ (p. 244). Johannes Müller's diachronic comparison of high-population agglomerations in European prehistory, in search of predecessors for the Heuneburg, allows for communal prehistoric ‘agency’ and introduces the term ‘controlled social agglomeration’ or ‘agglo-control’ (p. 106). There, perhaps in an attempt to salvage agency for a potentially powerful prehistoric people, he argues that ‘the creation of such huge sites is based on economic and social decisions made by communities’ (p. 119). The agglomerations he speaks of, and which feature centrally in John Chapman's and Bisserka Gaydarska's chapter (Ch. 6), are the strikingly early, surprisingly large, but rather low-density Trypillia mega-sites of Ukraine, for which the term ‘rurban’ settlement has been used by Michael G. Smith (cited by Chapman & Gaydarska in Ch. 6, p. 82).

At least two lines of thought start from here: urban attributes and evolutionary models of (settlement) growth. For urban attributes, in this volume (Ch. 10) M.E. Smith has drawn up a list of twenty-one urban attributes that can help emancipate archaeological sites from definitions of modern cities and describe them in their diversity and complexity (p. 159). Just as prehistoric identity is different from modern identity, for Smith it is clear that ‘In most parts of the world […] the very earliest indigenous cities were political cities whose economic role was quite limited’ (p. 165). Gary M. Feinman looks at it from the opposite perspective and challenges the prevailing model of ‘ancient economies as politically controlled’ (p. 139). Drawing on his case study of Aztec settlements in the Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico), he shows ‘that Marx's economic model (derived from his interpretations of Asia) does not tightly conform to the available data for prehispanic Mesoamerica’ and adds that the model ‘has been questioned both for parts of premodern Asia itself […] and for other regions […]’ (p. 145).

As for evolutionary models of (settlement) growth, Chapman and Gaydarska (Ch. 6) observe an inverse ‘growth’ in the early examples of Trypillia mega-sites. That is, an evolution from ‘big weird sites’ to later similar settlements with smaller dimensions (p. 82). Svend Hansen, describing the development of Iron Age giant tumuli (Ch. 15), states that Tumulus MM in Gordion (Anatolia), which was built around 740 bc, is ‘both the oldest and largest Early Iron Age tumulus’. He sees it as ‘the locus classicus’ (p. 236) that ‘could have been a model for other burial mounds’ (p. 237). What could be described as ‘from big to small’ is a phenomenon that contradicts our intuitive evolutionary expectation, namely that things, like living beings, start small and grow in size with time. But with artefacts it often seems to be the opposite, e.g. stone tools went from fist-fitting hand-axes in the Palaeolithic to microliths in the Mesolithic. This can be observed in the medieval period also: Andreas Haasis-Berner (Reference Haasis-Berner, Igel, Jansen, Röber and Scheschkewitz2013) describes the phenomenon with early medieval church bells and baptismal fonts, where the oldest objects of the eighth to tenth centuries ad tend to be huge (though not numerous) and far outweigh later examples. It would be worth examining this more systematically across periods and places and considering the validity of other models of reproduction or development.

Since it is impossible to give an appreciation of every single chapter, I would like to highlight a few especially instructive elements in the book: Fernández-Götz and Krausse illustrate (p. 321, fig. 22.1) the centralization process between central Italy and northern Germany from the eighth to third century bc. From their unusual map stretching north-south well across the Alps, it becomes clear that Etruscan cities, Late Hallstatt and La Tène A princely seats, as well as Middle La Tène fortified centres are not only chronologically but also topographically separate developments. This map compares well with several maps and models by other authors, e.g. Pierre-Yves Milcent's ‘hypothetical evocation of the network genesis of the La Tène cultures’ (fig. 27.5), or Bintliff's description of ‘typical moyenne durée wave of development’ derived from the model of the French Annales School (p. 244 & 249) or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's ‘respiration of a social structure’ (Reference Le Roy Ladurie1966: 8, cited by Bintliff, p. 249). While well acquainted with Assman's ‘cultural memory’ theory (p. 193) or—since the Stuttgart conference—with ‘the big history’ concept presented here by Fred Spier (p. 127), I learned much from Jean Guilaine's concise, compelling, and compact round-up of ‘the emergence of the Near Eastern Neolithic’ (pp. 68–69).

I would recommend that archaeologists read out of their disciplinary and geographical box and study David R. Olsen's chapter on ‘History of Writing, History of Rationality’ (pp. 40–51) or Alain Thote's contribution on ‘Elite Burials in First-Millennium bc China’ (pp. 211–24). Olsen shows that ‘the ability to think about the world is an ability conferred by language’ and ‘to think about language is a gift conferred by writing’ (p. 49). Thote, on the other hand, presents a Chinese Iron Age where burials contain handwritten books, family archives, law compilations, and burial rite descriptions that attest not only to elite literacy, but also to the development of a ‘bureaucratic form’ of ‘contractual relationship between human beings and the gods’ (p. 222).

In the final Part VIII (‘Changing Symbols: Changing Minds?’), Rudolf Echt (Ch. 24) discusses the increasing number of elaborate female burials in the transition from Hallstatt to La Tène, which seems to be connected with the rise of women in social hierarchy. With this he sets a counterpoint, starting with Hernando's contribution (Ch. 4, pp 58–61), to all the male-muscle-martial élite focus that has been present from the beginning of the book. Echt refers to the Lady of Vix (pp. 360–64), the burial that is mentioned also by many other authors in this volume, either as a possible example of a female dynasty (Fernández-Götz & Krausse, Ch. 22, pp. 324–25) or as an example of a ‘personality with multiple identities’ (Hansen, Ch. 15, pp. 231–32, citing Verger, Reference Verger and Guilaine2009, contra Péré-Noguès, Reference Péré-Noguès2011). Altogether, Part VIII is not the strongest section of the book when it comes to explaining the La Tène art style and its revolutionary impact on visual perception. There are other works, partly by the same authors, that serve this purpose better (e.g. Wells, 2012; Bagley, Reference Bagley2014; Gosden et al., Reference Gosden, Crawford and Ulmschneider2014). This may also be because these publications make their case with the help of well-designed illustrations and excellent colour photographs.

While most of the chapters seem to have benefited from excellent language editing, some fall short of the high standard set in the initial contributions. Consequently, we are exposed not only to regional case studies, but sometimes also to a strong flavour of the languages these contributions stem from. Here, my pencil ends up marking wrong word order, repetitions, and word creations from Denglish (Ch. 22), Franglais (Ch. 27), and Itaglese (Ch. 20). These chapters are very important, if not central, contributions and we should be grateful to the authors for presenting their research to a largely monolingual Anglo-American academic audience. But here the language limitations of international publications and the advantage of native speakers (and good writers) of English in modern Western academia becomes clear.

Here, I drop my pencil and leave the book behind, my head filled with treasures and hoping to have made readers intellectually hungry. Let us step into the bright light of the modern world, search for traces of ancient places, and contemplate old objects. There is a whole world of first millennia (bc and ad) still to discover and discuss in and beyond this book.