This book emerged from a weeklong research seminar at the School of American Research in 2000 entitled “The Archaeology of Colonies in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” It is organized less as a series of distinct papers than as chapters that refer closely to each other, the arguments of each informing and expanding on those of the others. The authors bring together widely dispersed cases of colonization, ranging in area from Mesopotamia to California, and in time from the fourth millennium b.c. through the nineteenth century. Most interesting is the range of the manifestations of colonial movement, from the trading colonies established by Uruk and Assyria in Anatolia (Stein), often within existing Anatolian settlements, to more substantial emporia around the Mediterranean settled by the Greeks (Dietler on Massilia) and the Phoenicians (Van Dommelin on Ibiza, Western Sardinia, and Andalusia), to the more classic cases of imperial Roman colonial establishments in Greece and Anatolia (Alcock).

The other case studies come from the Americas, almost all in imperial settings, although with major differences between them. These include two Mexican cases—the Soconusco region in the colonial period (Gasco) and the Zapotec settlement in Teotihuacan (Spence), two studies of Peru, one of the contrasting experiences of Spanish and Russian colonization in California (Lightfoot), Schreiber's account of the Wari colonial experience in Nasca, and D'Altroy's examination of the far more interventionist Inka resettlement and colonization. A concluding section by J. Daniel Rogers attempts to make sense of all this in terms of archaeological methodology. There is an excellent index and a unified and impressive bibliography.

This is a fine set of studies, presented by archaeologists deeply involved with the questions on the table. Each is valuable for its illumination of one of the many facets of colonial settlement. There must be some doubt as to whether we should accept the term ‘colony’ as the equivalent of the Greek apoikia, so that any group of settlers away from home will count, or whether we should restrict ourselves to the more standard sense of a colony established by a state outside of its immediate territory. The example I found most fascinating was Spence's treatment of the community of Tlailotlacan, a displaced Zapotec enclave in the heart of the capital city of the Aztec empire. The immigrants seem to have controlled the production and supply of lime to the city. This was but one of a network of Oaxacan sites, and Spence traces the movement of objects and of women (through isotope analysis of their teeth) from their homeland to the city and other communities of the Oaxacan diaspora. Here we have a trading and artisan community emanating from a non-hegemonic source, just like the Punic sites whose fate Van Dommelin charts in the Western Mediterranean. Perhaps it would make sense to make a simple distinction between imperial colonies sent by a state into territories it actively controls and those that remain embedded within an existing society without exercising control over it.

This sort of categorization, however, is just what every author in the book argues against. Almost every chapter begins with some ritual Wallerstein-bashing. (It is hard to beat Dietler's line that world systems models have had “less heuristic than hallucinogenic” effects on archaeology.) This is usually followed by a rejection of all dichotomies, the least popular being that between colonizer and colonized. It is, of course, true that the range of players and their interactions in any given colonial situation is far too complex to be reduced to simple opposition. Still, Alcock bravely warns against throwing out the baby with the bathwater when we attempt to nuance the relationship between, say, the categories “Roman” and “Greek” (p. 325).

Roger's attempt to rebuild a structure from all this deconstruction is not entirely successful. If he is right that we must look beyond individuals and the random remains of their actions that archaeologists recover, his final recommendations—that we quantify our finds and situate them in their cultural and temporal contexts so that we can compare them in a significant fashion—does not seem far from what archaeologists have always done or at least attempted to do. C. Gosden's recent Archaeology and Colonialism (Cambridge, 2004) usefully proposes the investigation of a “middle ground” between colonizer and colonized as a way forward.