The Oxford Handbooks series aims to provide up-to-date surveys of the state of a particular subject area, and this extensive volume amply demonstrates the vitality of current research into the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England. Its fifty-two contributors represent a veritable Who's Who of the field, including many eminent senior scholars and several younger researchers, whose essays reveal just how much the discipline has matured since the publication of the last major overview of Anglo-Saxon archaeology (Wilson Reference Wilson1976). The intervening three and a half decades have not only produced a vast corpus of new evidence from excavations and metal-detecting activity, but they have also witnessed the development of new scientific techniques to analyse that material and the widespread application of sociological and anthropological theories to its interpretation. The resulting archaeology has fundamentally altered our traditional understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. This handbook provides an authoritative review of current debates and approaches to the field that will no doubt serve as a major point of reference for scholars, students and non-specialists for many years to come.

Multi-authored compendia sometimes suffer from a lack of cohesion between their constituent parts, but that is not the case here; Hamerow, Hinton and Crawford should be commended for the tight editing and thoughtful organisation of this volume. The editors have divided the book into ten parts, each thematically focused on one of ‘those aspects of Anglo-Saxon life and culture which archaeology has fundamentally illuminated’ (p xxii). These aspects include issues of long-standing archaeological interest such as ethnicity (Part 1), mortuary ritual (Part III), rural and urban settlement (Parts II and VI) and subsistence activities (Parts IV and V), as well as more recent research trajectories focusing on ideology, such as mentalities of the life course (Part VII), religion (Part VIII) and power (Part IX). Each part contains between four and seven chapters arranged roughly chronologically, moving from the late Roman fourth century through to the post-Conquest eleventh. Most helpfully, the editors invited established authorities on each theme to write ‘Overview’ chapters, which serve as introductions to each part and tie together key themes and arguments running through the individual contributions therein. As a result, this potentially unwieldy thousand-plus-page book reads much more like ten distinct, well-crafted, hundred-page books, each of which would function on its own as an excellent primer for anyone who wants to be quickly brought up to speed on a given aspect of the field, whether she be an undergraduate archaeology student or a scholar of Anglo-Saxon England working in another discipline.

That is not to say, however, that chapters in different parts do not speak to one another; indeed, some of the biggest pleasures of the book come from reading chapters that treat similar bodies of evidence from different perspectives. For example, scientific analyses of animal husbandry (by Terry O'Connor) and diet (by Bradley Hull and Tamsin O'Connell) in Parts IV and VII acquire new layers of meaning when read against the interdisciplinary investigations of Naomi Sykes and Aleks Pluskowski into the role that wild animals played in social differentiation (Part IV) and religious beliefs (Part VIII), respectively. The book's most explicit appeal to interdisciplinarity comes in the final section (Part X), which is also the weakest. Part X aims to explore what the editors describe as ‘the complex, potentially fruitful, yet sometimes still uneasy relationship between archaeological, historical, anthropological, and literary approaches’ (p xxiv), but the five essays here form the least coherent section of the book, and one wonders why the editors chose not to solicit an ‘Overview’ to pull these arguments together as was so effectively done everywhere else.

Still, this is a minor quibble with what is unmistakably an extremely impressive publication that is sure to have a very long shelf life. The high quality of the essays from so many distinguished contributors and the up-to-date bibliographies should ensure that these chapters find their way on to student reading lists for years to come, while the range of topics covered and the very useful general and site indexes at the back of the volume should make it a reference text of lasting value to any scholar of Anglo-Saxon England.