In his latest book, Peter Mitchell invites interdisciplinary and cross-regional studies of the eponymous post-1492 ‘horse nations’. Assembling diverse archaeological, ethnographic and material culture studies of the horse in the Americas, South Africa and Australasia from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, he impressively surveys more than 40 indigenous societies. Revisiting a debate in American anthropology over whether cultural change should be attributed to the horse (Roe Reference Roe1955; Wissler Reference Wissler1912) or developments already ongoing within recipient cultures (Palermo Reference Palermo1986), Mitchell incorporates critical post-colonial methodologies emphasizing non-homogenous cultures, dynamic processes of ethnogenesis, and contact as a set of mutually entangling processes, and asks: did the horse, in fact, impact culture formation where it was newly introduced, and more importantly, how? Mitchell proposes that archaeology, with its focus on material culture, uniquely enables this measure and allows for more ambitious inter-continental comparisons. In brief, the adoption of horses, for Mitchell, indeed constituted ‘an extraordinary event’ whose cultural consequences can be assessed according to his proposed four-part typology. The horse, in this sense, serves as a proxy for not only the effects of colonization, but also the indigenous and animal agency that shaped the direction of these developments. After an overview of the chapter organization, this review will focus on Mitchell's ambitions for large-scale comparisons of the ‘horse nations’ with pastoralism-nomadism constructs, and new insights from the material culture of the horse into indigenous relational ontologies.

Horse Nations begins with a summary of the evolution of the modern horse species, Equus caballus, closely following the cladistics systematics modelled by McFadden (1979) to sketch the re-current migration of ‘caballine’ horses from the Americas to Eurasia and Africa, 1.2 million to 8000 years ago. It then delves into the most recent work on extinction events and domestication in the Eurasian steppe in the fourth millennium bc (Anthony Reference Anthony2007; Bendrey Reference Bendrey2012), before leaping ahead to the post-1492 moment. The bulk of the book is organized according to nine ecological regions, primarily in the North and South American continents (Southern Plains; Northern Prairie; Great Basin; Columbian Plateau; California; Amazonia; Gran Chaco and Mato Grosso; Patagonia and Pampas) and one chapter devoted to outback Australia and mid-elevation mountain ranges in South Africa. In laying out this structure for his comparative project, Mitchell calls attention to the unfortunate discontinuities between palaeontological studies of equine evolution and archaeological studies of equine domestication, between prehistoric archaeology and ethnohistorical anthropology in the Americas, and between North and South American archaeology, that could otherwise be gainfully and complementarily employed.

Mitchell's book emphasizes that the changes wrought by adoption of the horse resulted from internal culture dynamics and the agency of choice. Rather than pursuing a unifying argument from ecological parameters, Mitchell demonstrates that within each of these regions some culture groups adopted the horse, some used it peripherally and others did not adopt it at all. To add order to this diversity, Mitchell offers a differential typology under the umbrella term horse nations. He delineates, first, those hunter-gatherer or mobile groups that became equestrian nomads, largely for big-game hunting in the Prairie and Gran Chaco regions; second, semi-mobile pastoralists, using horses as accessories to other economic pursuits like herding, including the Navajo, Comanche and Australian aborigine; third, raiders and traders interested in the horse as an object for consumption, including the Great Basin Utes and South African Khoe; and fourth, sedentary and hierarchical groups that adopted horses for less obvious economic motives, most strikingly the Araucanians in the Southern Cone.

Extending Pekka Hämäläinen's (Reference Hämäläinen2013) description of the ‘kinetic empire’, Mitchell emphasizes that increased mobility had the greatest impact in horse nations, given enough time and space for distinct cultural transformation. In this respect, Mitchell's typology pairs neatly with one offered in Kradin, Bondarenko and Barfield's Nomadic Pathways (Reference Kradin, Bondarenko and Barfield2003), which views nomadism in gradations of movement and social stratification, distinguishing nomadic, semi-nomadic, semi-sedentary and sedentary forms. In fact, Mitchell precisely aims to provoke a cross-regional examination of nomadic culture that incorporates post-1492 horse nations, without cordoning off ‘equestrian nomads’ (as hunter-gatherers) from pastoralist nomads. Mitchell gives credit to the important effects of ethnogenesis as a factor in the creation of horse nations, such as the dispersed Khoe in South Africa or the Arauco in Chile, and also the crucial vector of the mixed ethnicity Comanchero or Korana raiders. Mitchell also marks the end point of the horse nation with the onset of modern technology of war, communications, transportation and national ideologies. Future comparison between Eurasian nomadic equestrians and pastoralists, filling the leap between domestication and the post-1492 world, would greatly clarify some of these points of interest.

Nomadism complicates theories of sociocultural evolution, emerging after the transition from egalitarian hunter-gatherer to stratified agricultural society, and as a consequence this book also endeavours to engage with questions of human and non-human relational ontologies. Major figures in this subject, like Tim Ingold (Reference Ingold2000) and Philippe Descola (Reference Descola2013), emphasize the shift from hunter to farmer as the turning point in human and non-human relations away from the attribution of ‘animals as persons’. Thus, an inquiry underlying the particular histories Mitchell has drawn together might be to ask: what kind of ontological relations provided such adaptive flexibility to accommodate the horse, and in which ones does the horse gain recognition as an ontological subject in myth and ritual? To take one of Mitchell's examples, the Wayuu people on the La Guajira peninsula in contemporary Venezuela did make the ontological extension to incorporate the horse into their agricultural activities, while contemporary groups in the llanos did not, despite later European success in this area. To explain this digression, Mitchell refers to the work of Descola on Amazonian pet-keeping practices that precluded their willingness to eat or work with animals that had crossed from wild to kin. In general, Mitchell sidesteps in-depth theoretical engagement with ontological questions, but he demonstrates that the horse fulfilled the same categorical positioning as a ‘big dog’, prey, or kin in some cases, while seemingly transforming religious material culture and origin myth in others, such that horse healers among the Blackfoot attributed their cultural origin to ancestral horses, supplemented by the remains of local equine fossils.

As a result, Mitchell's work implicates, although does not dwell on, the additional importance of revisiting domestication theories in relation to nomadism typologies. Mitchell considers the difficulty in discerning precisely what form of domestication shaped early Steppe or Indo-European cultures. However, the first mention of horse breeding practice among the horse nations only emerges in the nineteenth century with the Nez Perce and Cayuse. The zooarchaeological record has reconsidered the sharp distinction between wild and domestic animals and the intermediary role of the commensal animal, and should be of acute interest to analysing culture groups that by all accounts sourced their horses from European breeders, through raids or trade, rather than either maintaining local herds or harvesting and taming feral equines. Drawing such discussions of forms of domestication and concomitant ways of thinking about the natural world into the typology of horse nations remains to be explored.

As an enormously expansive, although not yet exhaustive, survey of major secondary works and primary studies, Horse Nations enriches the potential engagement between archaeology, history and anthropology on the topic of the horse, and in human–animal studies more generally. Despite staking out a timeframe post-1492, the materials concentrate in the mid seventeenth to nineteenth century and omit cases in Southeast Asia. As Mitchell concludes, there is clearly need for more primary reports, even within the Americas and certainly beyond to Africa and Australasia. That Mitchell's book has charged into a gap eyed by current scholarship is evident in the burgeoning networks dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of non-human animals, and equines in particular, including the Equine Research Network (Rhys Evans) and Equine Social Science Research (Kirrilly Thompson). As indicated by at least a dozen carefully posed questions found in the introduction alone, this book professes broad aims and excavates numerous avenues for further examination. In this respect, Horse Nations points the way to more work to come.