Monacan Millennium situates an Indigenous archaeology and history within a deep and enduring temporal framework as called for in decolonizing archaeological methodologies. It presents the voices of those who have spoken about and for the Monacan, and more importantly, the voices of the Monacan people themselves. Jeffrey Hantman—who has had the honor of working with and writing about this tribal nation to the west of Tidewater, Virginia, for 30 years—offers lessons learned and insights gained instructive to creating meaningful spaces for Native people within the structures and practices of archaeology. The outcome is an accessible and informative book on decolonizing archaeological practice.

Hantman has listened closely. The first chapter examines early Spanish and English accounts and suggests that more is known about the Monacan people than has been acknowledged. Attention to these sources implies that descriptions that led to their marginalization in later history writing and that undergirded years of racist colonialist policies emerged in the intricate choreography of colonial relations in which the Powhatan on the coast attempted to control information about and access to Virginia's mineral-rich interior. The Monacan, traditional enemies of and trading partners with the Powhatan, were cast as hostile and uncooperative. Colonial thinking and its resultant discourse that framed these characterizations in binaries in which the Monacan were negatively depicted had lasting implications for how they would be known for centuries.

The second and third chapters turn to archaeological evidence. Chapter 2 looks at the way Thomas Jefferson, “the father of American archaeology,” viewed the Monacan. It recounts his excavation of a Monacan burial mound that was used for centuries and later visited by descendants to conduct memorial ceremonies. Yet, Jefferson was more interested in Native American origins than living traditions, and much like other settler colonists, he assumed that the region's Native people had disappeared. Ironically, his observations about the mound situated the Monacan in archaeological culture history and commented on their persistence. Chapter 3 synthesizes what is known about them from modern archaeological surveys and excavations that aimed to write their history to 1607. It presents evidence about their houses, settlements, economy, warfare, and burials. But it goes beyond archaeological “facts” to craft a picture of town life in which the presence of burial mounds defined certain townscapes as sacred places and seats of chiefly authority. The interpretation shifts the understanding of Indigenous rule strictly from materialist concerns to an emphasis on the nexus of land, history, and identity. A Native-centered approach is key to Hantman's seminal analysis of Jamestown's survival in Chapter 4, and it serves as a crucial link in recovering the later Monacan from colonialist historiography.

Hantman has not written a truncated culture history. Instead, he traces the diverse ways in which the Monacan persisted and maintained community after 1607. The archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence in Chapter 5 sheds new light on Monacan survivance from 1650 to 1800, when the myth of their disappearance became accepted knowledge among Virginia's English settler colonists. Some Monacan remained in their large towns into the early eighteenth century. Others dispersed. They formed smaller, less visible settlements, they established trading towns, and they joined Siouan- and Iroquoian-speaking peoples. The Virginia Piedmont was devoid of neither Indigenous bodies nor Indigenous histories, as has been implied in terminal narratives. Local dispersal, as Hantman notes, is a more accurate description of how the later Monacan dwelled in the land and persisted within the social and cultural landscapes of Virginia than what is portrayed in tropes of disappearance.

In the final chapter, Monacan voices resonate loudly. Here, Hantman reflects on his long-term collaborative relationship with the Monacan beginning in 1990—one year after the state recognized the tribe—to 2018, when it received federal recognition. The chapter navigates the modern Monacan Indian Nation's painful history, during which their indigeneity was not only questioned but also denied in acts of documentary genocide sanctioned by Virginia's eugenicist policies. Pejorative labels still sting, as do other difficult reminders. Although the specific details vary, the Monacan people's complex ancestry and hurtful colonial history has a familiar ring to readers knowledgeable about other Native communities in North America whose struggles for federal recognition and sovereignty are burdened—if not impeded—by such legacies. For the Monacan, their stories of survivance are what matter and what they want told. Hantman has done this. Collaborative projects recorded the architectural and archaeological presence of their last 200 years, and they resulted in the return of ancestral remains and artifacts to their rightful owners. In an unexpected turn, archaeology enabled the Monacan to gaze at the faces of two ancestors, a man and a woman, reconstructed at their request. Until then, no Monacan had ever seen images of ancestors older than those in a 1914 photograph. By listening closely as Hantman has, other archaeologists can learn how a humanistic approach can contribute to decolonizing archaeological practice.