Archaeologies of ‘modern world’ colonialism and enslavement are booming research topics. Although studies of the North American experience have tended to dominate the literature, the last decade has seen the proliferation of numerous archaeological studies of colonialism in Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, which widen the scope. Similarly, the dominance of Anglophone writers has reduced, with more perspectives provided by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking archaeologists from across the diverse regions and national contexts south of the US border. The three books reviewed here are part of that trend. In addition, these volumes, with different levels of emphasis, engage with some of the hottest topics in current archaeologies of colonialism and enslavement: labour, gender, identity, materiality and multi-ethnic interactions.

Archaeology of culture contact and colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Funari and Senatore, consists of 19 chapters that take a geographically expansive view of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism across the Americas. It does so with a significant—but not exclusive—reliance on Latin American archaeologists writing in, or translated into, English. It includes contributions ranging from the southernmost reaches of South America in Patagonia to the northernmost colonial footprint of Basque fishers in north-eastern Canada. The authors examine with fresh perspectives a myriad of colonial encounters, long-term settlements and short-term emplacements. Most contributors focus on case studies rather than extended theoretical engagements or larger issues. In this, they follow the call of the editors, in their introduction, to break down the ‘grand narratives’ of colonialism; Barbara Voss reiterates this theme in her eloquent concluding chapter.

The second volume under review, Current perspectives on the archaeology of African slavery in Latin America, edited by Funari and Orser, emphasises a similar geographic region but with a specific emphasis on African slavery. The authors include a fairly equal mix of North American and Latin American archaeologists, covering topics in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Jamaica. They employ some case studies, but the chapters have a notably stronger interpretive, and often political, commitment to covering marronage—the self-extraction of enslaved people from the societies that held them in bondage. The editors lead with a fine introduction that sets the stage and prepares to push forward the archaeology of slavery, although it has to be the first chapter I have seen in many years that does so—problematically for me—without a single reference.

The third book under review here is a single-authored monograph by Arcangeli that fills yet another lacuna by focusing on Guadeloupe, a French colony in the Caribbean. The author carefully considers the intersections of archaeological remains and probate inventory records to reveal the intricacies of life and labour among colonists, Creoles and captives. In contrast to the plantation and rural contexts that typify studies of enslavement, Arcangeli focuses on the island's urban centres. She provides a remarkable ‘thick description’ of lives intertwined with ceramics, although the volume is not as exclusively concerned with pottery sherds as the blurb description suggests, for Arcangeli critically engages with material culture also mentioned and spatialised in archived inventories.

One of the most important topics discussed across all three volumes is labour. This is not the classic economics of previous generations, but rather an understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of exchange, labour regimes and extensive transatlantic flows of goods. For some years, archaeologists have been aware of the fundamental role of indigenous and African labour in Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and the reverse flows of those economic and labouring relationships back to the metropole. The specific intersection of local and imported—that is, indigenous and African—labour deserves particular attention, however, as the archaeologies of enslavement and colonialism have not crossed paths nearly enough.

Arcangeli's work on Guadeloupe does a magnificent job highlighting labour, especially as inflected through gender. Readers gain a strong sense of how ceramics were used in everyday eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life and work, often by enslaved domestic workers gathering water, setting tables, cooking food and promoting bodily health. Arcangeli achieves this by making an active, and I think correct, choice to focus on the use, not production, of ceramics. She also thoughtfully compares the lives of the island's colonists and subjects to life in other French colonies and in Paris itself. Similarly, the chapter by André Teixeira, Joana Bento Torres and José Bettencourt in the Funari and Senatore volume successfully presents a case for considering the effects of Portuguese colonies in Brazil back in Portugal itself, whether in terms of sugar, tobacco and pipes, plants and animals, or wood and ceramics. One might add to this the chapter by Marcos André T. Souza in the Funari and Orser volume; the authors explore the situated practices, particularly surrounding pottery, of the enslaved in nineteenth-century Brazil, and hence avoid falling back on assumptions about the ‘retention’ of practices with African origins.

Throughout the Funari and Senatore volume, various chapters add depth to this topic. Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, Franz Scaramelli and Ana María Navas Méndez highlight what we can learn from colonisation efforts when economics and labour are emphasised. In one of the strongest contributions to the book, they discuss the ways in which Spanish mining interests in Mexico actually supported indigenous technologies, and how Aztec oversight in villages determined local uses of obsidian and metal more than the presence of Spaniards; they also outline how the influx of new European materials in the Orinoco region of Venezuela enhanced local status because trade itself, not the specific objects of trade, provided that social capital. In the same volume, Franz Scaramelli and Kay Scaramelli discuss other dimensions of labour in the Orinoco region, including livestock ranching, manufacturing and the sale of forest products, and the production of ceramics for trade. Furthermore, Pauline Martha Kulstad-González focuses intensively on the multi-ethnic labour force, class organisation and ranked workers of sixteenth-century Concepción de la Vega (Hispaniola) through the gold-to-sugar economic transition.

Susan Kepecs resurrects a “world systems perspective” and the notion of “false consciousness”—although both feel dated—to talk about the “sanctity of commerce” (p. 114) for the Yucatec Maya and the ways that ideological messages were encoded within Catholic iconography along ancient trade routes. Moreover, Luís Cláudio Pereira Symanski and Denise Maria Cavalcante Gomes interestingly consider (although with too few citations) the multiple identities, African/indigenous interactions, intermarriage and labour relations in Santarém, Brazil, using ceramics and spatial analysis. One also finds similar coverage in the Funari and Orser volume. María Angélica Suaza Español explores the intersections of African and native workers and bodies in the Neiva province in Colombia using (often without much archaeology) pottery, architecture, clothing and food. Carlos Magno Guimarães, Camila Fernandes de Morais and Luisa de Assis Roedel also look at the ethnic diversity in Minas Gerais, Brazil, focusing on social divisions between those who are free and enslaved, and those who own or do not own slaves, while underscoring the work of building and mining by enslaved persons.

A stand-out chapter is Guido Pezzarossi's contribution to the Funari and Senatore volume. Here, he extends his arguments concerning ‘antimarkets’, using the ideas of Manuel DeLanda and Fernand Braudel to understand the entanglements of power, hierarchy and economics. This kind of nuance permits a view of Spanish feudal colonial contexts and precolonial Mesoamerican political economies that avoids considering capitalism as a reified monolithic category. As Pezzarossi carefully develops, it was the dispossession of time and labour, not the dispossession of land, that led to market dependencies in this colonial-era Maya town in Guatemala.

Of course, any discussion of slavery in Latin America or elsewhere is fundamentally about labour: the attempts both to control it and to resist that control. Readers will find these themes central to the Funari and Orser volume, especially given the strong emphasis by many of the chapters on active self-extraction from forced labour. Two chapters work over the issue with some theoretical sophistication and comparative examples: Christopher Fennell compares the USA and Brazil using his concept of “ethnogenic bricolage” (p. 100); and Kristen Fellows and James Delle discuss marronage, spatial sovereignty and field houses in Jamaica. The critical perspective guiding these two chapters is not the idea of a simple resistance of enslaved workers to slavery, but rather a concerted attempt by participants of the African diaspora to secure a new existence. This kind of reframing has been influential, due in part to the recent work of Daniel Sayers. In his contribution to the volume, Sayers laments how he has been chided for using excessively evocative language about the conditions of slavery, but one could easily take the chapter by Lúcio Menezes Ferreira and Gabino La Rosa in the same volume, which covers the branding of slaves in Cuba, to envision some of the bodily horrors of property ownership that he insists must be considered. Sayers challenges archaeologists to focus on a Marxist notion of praxis—or action in the world guided by critique—rather than a more standard focus on culture, ethnogenesis, syncretism or even resistance. To him, praxis better contextualises acts of marronage in the past and the lessons for today.

It would be difficult to talk about economics and labour without attention to gender and religion. As noted, Arcangeli's book carefully situates gendered experiences in Guadeloupe's ‘ceramic culture’, but others also bring it to the forefront, often coupling it appropriately with concerns about bodies and identities. In the Funari and Senatore volume, Diana DiPaolo Loren, astutely as always, summons her longstanding work on the Los Adaes Presidio at the northern reach of New Spain to examine questions of bodies, health and gender. Lourdes Domínguez and Funari provide a rather cursory overview of Cuban colonial archaeology that highlights gender and religious relations, as well as notions of mixture, contact and enslavement. Nan Rothschild attempts, with somewhat moderate success, a summary of the variation and possibilities of gender relations in the colonial Spanish Southwest using what she calls a large ‘archive’ of documents, oral history, archaeology, performance and bodies.

Another interesting angle on colonialism in these volumes concerns the short-lived nature of some settlements and interactions. In the Funari and Senatore volume, Agustín Azkarate and Sergio Escribano-Ruiz discuss Sancti Spiritus in Argentina and its explicit colonial intent; they reverse authorship, as Escribano-Ruiz and Azkarate, to outline the early Basque fishing ventures in eastern Canada and associated short-term encounters with a variety of indigenous groups. Maria Ximena Senatore covers the brief occupation of the colony of Floridablanca in Patagonia and the effects of Enlightenment ideas on settlement models and novelty; Horacio Chiavazza's chapter reads almost like a site report on the short-lived sixteenth-century settlement of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. Julie Rogers Saccente and Nancy Marie White recount the four-year inhabitation and archaeological signature of the multi-ethnic Spanish Fort San José in Florida; in a unique parallel, Paulo Fernando Bava de Camargo discusses nautical landscapes in sixteenth-century Brazil as ephemeral yet fundamental spaces of encounter and transaction.

From another angle, reviewing must also attend to the materiality and structure of books as an accompaniment to their content. The Arcangeli volume, published by a university press at a price commensurate to its size and format, is well done overall, with a distinctive cover, high-quality copy-editing, readable prose and consistent delivery throughout. The two Springer volumes are less successful. Both have jarring cover designs that have become the brand of this publisher's catalogue. One might assume that the use of such boilerplate design might lower costs, but the hefty price on both books places them out of the range of students and many professionals. Admittedly, a higher price tag can finance special features, such as colour plates, but several of the latter fail to add anything compared to a black-and-white option. Additionally, one would hope that a steep retail price would also guarantee the highest quality of proofreading and copy-editing, but neither Springer book satisfies, particularly the Funari and Senatore volume. Both have numerous typographical errors, inconsistent formatting between chapters, no cross-referencing between contributions to demonstrate the unity of the volume and no standardisation in even the spelling of archaeology/archeology. I realise that some chapters in the Funari and Senatore volume (and also others in the Funari and Orser volume) have Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking authors who wrote in English and a couple of chapters had professional translations, both of which will produce quite acceptable idiosyncrasies as various concepts, terms and even phrasing and syntax do not translate easily. A copy-editor, however, should have caught many problems noticeable to even casual readers. I also find it egregious that Springer has published home addresses as contact information for some of the authors!

In conclusion, these volumes offer worthwhile contributions to the literature on colonialism and enslavement in Latin America and beyond. The Funari and Senatore book is a must-read for anyone seeking an enriched perspective on specific cases of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas, even if the interpretive inspiration and quality of treatment varies. I definitely recommend the Funari and Orser volume for a conceptually and empirically rich archaeological treatment of Latin American enslavement, making it required reading for historical archaeologists across the hemisphere. Finally, Arcangeli's Guadeloupe monograph, with its careful analysis of material and textual data, will be required reading for historical archaeologists focusing on any combination of Caribbean contexts, French colonialism, ceramic studies, slavery, labour and gender.