A common criticism of those archaeologists who ‘do theory’ in their research on southwest Asia is that they are importing Euro-American perspectives into the Near Eastern context. Putting implications of neocolonialism aside for the moment, this importation also has been embraced by some as a positive trend. In the final chapter of this timely and welcome volume, Ianir Milevski and Bernardo Gandulla refer to Kent Flannery's late 1990s comments on the perceived positive influence of New Archaeology on research in the region: ‘Explanatory, processual, evolutionary archaeology is alive and well in the southern Levant’ (Flannery Reference Flannery and Levy1998, xx). These celebratory comments were made in the preface of the second edition of an influential volume, The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, edited by Thomas Levy (Reference Levy1998: 1st edn. 1995), who is also one of the editors of the collection under review here. At a time when the processual versus postprocessual debate was all but exhausted in much European archaeology, Flannery's claim appeared somewhat dated to many scholars. It was, after all, 16 years since the foundational postprocessual critique of New Archaeology by Ian Hodder in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (Reference Hodder1982), and more than a decade since the publication of the same author's Reading the Past (1986), and Shanks and Tilley's inflammatory but game-changing Re-Constructing Archaeology and Social Theory and Archaeology (both 1987). Although influential in Europe, less so in the USA, these works are rarely, if ever, cited by scholars of the ‘Ancient Near East’. But the influence of these early postprocessual perspectives marks a point of departure for Milevski and Levy's Framing Archaeology in the Near East, which joins a growing number of works (cited in their introduction) that have recently engaged with the fruitful connections between general social theory and the deep history of archaeological inquiry.

The nine chapters in this volume originate in a workshop at the 8th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE) at the University of Warsaw in 2012. According to the volume's preface, the aim of this workshop was to ‘bring together international scholars working in the Middle East who actively apply social theory in their fieldwork’, in order to ‘address the lack of such themes primarily among local archaeologists working in the region’. The editors’ introduction considers a number of reasons why social theory—or archaeological theory in general—is rarely explicitly discussed in Near East archaeology. These range from the nature of disciplinary and academic structures, including the often-blamed theory/practice divide between academia and cultural resource management, to the entrenched positions of different regional and historical traditions that see little relevance in perceived theoretical abstraction.

The individual contributors respond to the challenges of these issues in a number of different ways and from a number of different theoretical perspectives and traditions. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the volume presents us with varying understandings of what constitutes ‘social theory’ in archaeology. Of course, there have been a number of different characterizations of ‘social archaeology’ throughout the history of the discipline, going back to the Marxist-influenced work of Gordon Childe, to the current ontological and materialist perspectives influenced by (initially, anyway) Latour's reassembly of ‘the social’, and beyond. But in Framing Archaeology in the Near East, the focus is largely on processual social archaeology as advocated by Renfrew in the early 1970s, which was concerned with the reconstruction of past social organization and systems, and on the various postprocessual engagements with general social theory, Marxism, feminism, semiotics and continental philosophy. Above all, there is a ‘postprocessual’ concern throughout the volume with the need for critical reflection in the construction of historical narratives grounded in solid theoretical foundations. This is important, since most of the contributors are based outside southwest Asia, and so the major ‘political’ challenges here are to engage with the archaeological material in ways that promote dialogue and collaboration with local scholars, and to reflect critically on the still prevalent Eurocentric framing of much ‘Near Eastern’ archaeology.

This latter point is discussed by Milevski and Gandulla (chapter 9), who outline the historical circumstances under which archaeological thinking and fieldwork developed in the Middle East throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moving from the colonial and imperial interests of European countries, and the biblical-focused American school, Milevski and Gandulla carefully avoid the typically black-and-white view of ‘biblical archaeology’ as little more than a tool of the Israeli nation state and provide a balanced account of the influence of Euro-American processual and postprocessual approaches on the archaeology of Israel and Palestine. They explore the complexity of the relationships between Europe, the United States and the Middle East that gave rise to the kinds of archaeologies that are currently practised in Israel/Palestine. These are inevitably tied to the opportunities and/or restrictions afforded by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights since 1967, which invariably influences theoretical perspectives on landscape, territoriality and the politics of both the past and the contemporary world.

Consideration of landscapes and temporalities also features in Michael Harrower's contribution on (human geography-related) theories of social space. Highlighting the potential of the new digital technologies for landscape survey and excavation, he argues that archaeological approaches to landscape have been hampered by the lack of constructive dialogue between those advocating a phenomenological approach (theory) and those using technologies such as GIS and other new forms of spatial analysis software (practice). Hopefully this attitude is a relic of another age, as integration of experiential and digital perspectives is now being addressed quite effectively by a number of landscape archaeology projects in the region, reflected in North America at least by considerable academic investment in digital humanities.

Two excellent papers by Joanna Mardas (chapter 2) and Elise Luneau (chapter 3) focus on gender. It is interesting to note that, although generally regarded as essential to the 1980s postprocessual critique, the first book-length critical examination of gender issues in the discipline, Gero and Conkey's edited collection Engendering Archaeology, was only published in 1991. In a great deal of Near Eastern archaeology, especially amongst prehistorians, it must be said that the lack of (published) engagement with issues of gender and sexualities is really quite astonishing. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, as cited by Mardas in her discussion of gender ambiguity in creation myths and material culture in Mesopotamia. Drawing on the seminal work of Judith Butler on the social and cultural construction of sex as well as gender, Mardas presents a rich account of the blurred nature of the boundaries within and between femininities and masculinities as represented in foundational Sumerian and Akkadian texts, and in representations on items of material culture. She argues that gender ambiguity was actively performed by men and women, not only through dress and appearance, but also by deploying gendered items of material culture in specific social settings, such as musical performances. It is telling that, in her conclusion, Mardas is compelled to point out that gender archaeology needs to move beyond the identification of women in the past. That she needs to say this at all is in no way reflective of her own well-developed theoretical position, which resonates with contemporary perspectives on sexualities and queer theory, but rather of the current calcified state of gender studies in Near Eastern archaeology as a whole.

Moving outside the Levant and Mesopotamia, Elise Luneau takes a more (but not exclusively) processual approach to her detailed analysis of Middle and Late Bronze Age (Oxus) burials from several sites in southern central Asia (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan). Linking gender to wider archaeological notions of identity, Luneau examines mortuary practices to identify social differentiation through treatment of the body and the quantity and perceived quality of accompanying material culture. Her study departs from conventional processual approaches to the ‘social dimensions of mortuary practices’ by not simply assuming that gender differences or inequalities will be reflected in, or represented by, differential treatment of the corpse or in the ‘richness’ of accompanying materials.

In a similar vein, Aaron Greener's (chapter 7) contribution on the third-millennium burials from Jericho reassesses the data from Kenyon's 1950s excavations at the tell to elucidate aspects of the Bronze Age community's social organization. While his conclusions—that the Jericho community was not necessarily characterized by social class differentiation, but by some degree of gender and age distinction—may fall into some classic processual mortuary analysis paradoxes, he goes beyond the processual frame of analysis by incorporating recent interpretive archaeological concerns with social agency, memory and identity into his thorough reworking of the original published material and subsequent interpretations.

Also focusing on the third millennium bce, Alessandro Di Ludovico's impressive interdisciplinary discussion of communications technologies goes way beyond the traditional view of the role of writing as a prime social technology in the political and legal structures of Early Bronze Age (Ur III period) Mesopotamia. In a shift of perspective that connects well with recent ‘sensory archaeologies’, Di Ludovico conceptualizes the apparatus of administrative (and thus political) authority as consisting of not only the materially written word (and being literate), but also the sensorial acts of oral histories, hearing and the ability to regulate and control key social information through degrees of abstraction. In a deft conclusion, Di Ludovico invites self-reflective consideration of our own scholarly labours and procedures of abstraction and how these may articulate with those of the past peoples we study, and those of our archaeological colleagues, of whom we are guests in their countries.

Colonial and postcolonial discourse informs Johnny Samuele Baldi's discussion (chapter 6) on technical and cultural boundaries in Late Chalcolithic northern Mesopotamia. Drawing upon the ‘French school’ of artefact technology studies (in the sense of Mauss’ techniques du corps and Leroi-Gourhan's chaîne opératoire), Baldi presents a ‘social technologies’ approach to the ceramic assemblage from the small but significant site of Tell Feres al-Sharqi (Syria), which appears to have been occupied continuously from the Late Ubaid through Late Uruk periods (fifth and fourth millennia bce). Rejecting the problematic colonial assumptions inherent in traditional ‘core-periphery’ models, Baldi argues instead that demonstrated technological continuities in ceramic biographies demonstrate the mutual transmission, a hybridization, of technical traditions between northern Mesopotamian communities and the Uruk colonial ‘core’. This perspective facilitates a more nuanced ‘postcolonial’ consideration of the nature of the transmission and assimilation of aspects of cultural identity amongst communities that have been traditionally characterized as being locked into structures of asymmetrical power relations.

In chapter 8, Juan Manuel Tebes also tackles the issue of power relations, in the context of a reappraisal of the (nation-)state model commonly used in biblical archaeology. Drawing on Max Weber's classic sociological definition of the state as the monopolization and legitimization of the use of violence or coercion, Tebes challenges the processual view of the first-millennium bce (Iron Age) polity of Edom as a unitary state or kingdom within a network of tribal confederations. Offering an alternative model, akin to, as the author recognizes, Renfrew's influential ‘peer polity interaction’, and also based on the anthropological definition of ‘chiefdoms’, Tebes argues that Edom is better understood as a kinship-based network of tribes with political authority residing with an elite ‘chief’ based in the administrative centre of Buseirah.

Finally, the location of theory in southwest Asian archaeology is brought dramatically up to date by Patrycja Filipowicz in her Peircian semiotic analysis of the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic imagery at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia. Only a few archaeologists have successfully incorporated Peirce's knotty semeiotic into the current theoretical milieu, but Filipowicz's careful reading of aspects of Peirce's theory of signs contributes to this growing body of scholarship by demonstrating its potential for moving beyond postprocessual and interpretive archaeologies’ continuing adherence to linguistic-based conceptions of sign relations. Emphasizing that symbols—in this case the wall paintings, decorative patterns on ceramics, figurines, and so on, at Çatalhöyük—are but one type of sign within a relationship with other types of sign (in Peirce's classification), Filipowicz argues that this realization allows for a powerful synchronic reading of the changing significance (meanings) of different images through time. Certain images retained their Neolithic significances into the Chalcolithic period, while others’ meanings became abstracted or lost with the emergence of new forms of social authority.

The most refreshing and encouraging aspects of Framing Archaeology in the Near East, and for which the editors should be congratulated, are the opportunities it affords to graduate and post-doctoral researchers to publish their works-in-progress, and to demonstrate the relevance and effectiveness of approaches that strive to interpret complex bodies of empirical data through the careful and reflective use of critical social theory. There is no recourse here to the arbitrary use of sociological terms and concepts, and the uncritical deployment of ethnographic analogy, that continue to characterize much archaeological practice in the region. A southwest Asia TAG surely beckons . . .