Contrary to Hawkes, who suggested that the archaeology of “prehistoric” or “non-literate” communities would have limited success accessing ancient knowledge, a variety of approaches today—notably social memory work, materiality, and new ontological theories—address how knowledge mattered in the past and was materialized as landscape alterations such as structures, monuments, and deposits. In this volume, Lynne Kelly provides another pathway to the knowledge and sociopolitical systems of oral communities. Eschewing symbolic or relational interpretations, Kelly suggests that many apparently inscrutable places, objects, or practices may actually have pragmatic functions. She argues that these materializations are ways in which oral cultures routinely preserve and transmit knowledge with high precision across generations. Because of the importance of memory and knowledge within society, the control over knowledge can become the basis of social power. Indeed, she argues that certain monuments were constructed as memory aids, what she refers to as mnemonic monuments, which facilitated recall and the controlled dissemination of formal knowledge necessary to societies by “a powerful knowledge elite.”

Two themes structure the book. The first regards the often unacknowledged ways in which oral traditions are no less structured than written traditions for information storage and transmission. Chapters 1–6 provide a unique and useful database as Kelly identifies and generalizes the ways oral societies systematically encode ecological knowledge, calendar keeping and astronomy, time-reckoning, genealogies, and navigation. Drawing on ethnographic case material, she describes how artificial memory, or oral technologies, enable large quantities of information to be stored indexically through formally learned and embodied techniques, such as songs, dance, rhythms, and myth, and other techniques that are materialized in objects, rock graphics, and landscape references. Recall using mnemonic techniques may involve prescribed song sequences or, in the case of the method of loci, prescribed movements and references to positions within a site or landscape.

The second theme of the volume regards her social evolutionary argument that an increase in population density and sedentary settlement may lead to a knowledge elite. In her view, the constraints of sedentary settlement and lowered capacity to move through a landscape may promote the construction of memory centers that would facilitate social gatherings and the control over knowledge by a select few within society. She develops 10 indicators that archaeologists could use to identify mnemonic monuments and knowledge elites, including a stratified or differentiated community without evidence of material wealth, labor investments without apparent reason, imbalances of trade, evidence that a place was constructed to be experienced in a sequential order to encode and recall information, acoustic enhancement, and references to other landscape or astronomical features. In Chapters 7–8, she considers these indicators in recent communities: the Yolngu of Australia, an example of hunter-gatherers whose mnemonic monument is the landscape itself, and the desert-farming Puebloan communities of the U.S. Southwest. In Chapters 9–11, Kelly provides three unique archaeological examples: Chaco Canyon, Poverty Point, and Stonehenge. There Kelly provides short literature reviews, but the bulk of each chapter relates her insights into the potential role of each place as a knowledge center based on her evaluation of the 10 indicators. I suspect many regional specialists, such as myself, may be critical of her interpretations based on their own specific knowledge. Yet she also provides substantive suggestions, some of which are testable, regarding the potential for acoustics, mound and timber emplacement, and objects to all participate in restricted or popular performances and knowledge exchange.

Overall, this is a clearly written, sometimes repetitive, and nicely illustrated volume. Kelly's approach is most successful when she provides generalizable examples of oral technologies and shows their centrality in the constitution of communities and their interactions with the broader world. The volume is perhaps less successful in her attempts to use mnemonics to explain the rise of social complexity. Indeed, Kelly's approach is at odds with recent studies of early monumentality among hunter-gatherers that have decoupled sedentism from participation in monumental construction. Furthermore, although she draws on numerous ethnographic examples, her argument lacks a nuanced discussion of social power, community process, and materiality than one might find elsewhere. That said, Kelly's pragmatic approach has made me rethink how I envision the ways that ancient communities reproduced social landscapes; I suspect that anyone who reads this will similarly appreciate the innovative perspective.