What is multispecies archaeology? Is it what environmental archaeologists have been doing all along? A specifically ecological approach to environmental archaeology? If so, is it based in a scientific understanding of ecology or the currently emerging humanistic one? These are among the questions raised by this important and intriguing book, whose various chapters exemplify all these approaches and collectively serve as a document of the states of the art. Perhaps it is too early to resolve such questions, and indeed these tensions were already present in the founding statement on multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich, Cultural Anthropology 25:545–576, 2010), the approach that inspired multispecies archaeology.

Suzanne Pilaar Birch's introduction outlines these varied interpretations of multispecies archaeology and sets them in the larger context of multispecies, posthumanist, and ecological approaches in other disciplines. She argues that the essence of multispecies archaeology is decentering humans, treating them as one species among many. This approach is shared by many but not all contributors. Following the introduction, 20 chapters are divided into four sections, each including what could be crudely designated as scientific and humanistic approaches. Case studies cover much of the world and span the Late Pleistocene to the present. Most chapters treat relationships among humans and animals; although other organisms are sometimes incorporated or the focus placed on the landscape, none prioritize human–plant relations. I wish I had space to engage with each of the chapters, because all raise points worth discussing and debating, and each chapter presents interesting material.

Part I, “Living in the Anthropocene,” contains the most contributions from nonarchaeologists. Many scholars, including some of those here, frame a multispecies/posthumanist approach as a moral imperative in a time of anthropogenic environmental catastrophe. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Anthropocene is invoked in many of the other chapters as well. Some of the authors note the irony that the Anthropocene concept explicitly centers human agency, whereas the remedy for the Anthropocene crisis is argued to be decentering it, dissolving boundaries between nature and culture.

Part II, “Multispecies Ecology of the Built Environment,” focuses on anthropogenic environments at a variety of scales smaller than the Anthropocene. Here, too, human agency is centered as it creates niches for other species, even as it is decentered by emphasizing the agency of these other species in occupying these niches willingly (often without invitation) and working their own transformations of shared living spaces.

Part III, “Agrarian Commitments toward an Archaeology of Symbiosis,” looks more specifically at the nature of multispecies interactions in agricultural settings, including the transition to agriculture (domestication). Laura Weyrich's (Chapter 14) overview of the changing human microbiome gives a sense of how the multispecies relationships within our bodies have changed in response to agricultural diets and other factors. The other chapters seek to render animal domestication and animal husbandry in a mutualistic light, and to decenter the origins of agriculture as the object of study.

The chapters in Part IV, “The Ecology of Movement,” use stable isotope analysis and other approaches to examine intersecting human and animal mobility. Four of five chapters deal with interactions with wild animals, but Oscar Aldred (Chapter 16) shows that a multispecies approach to mobility is equally applicable to livestock.

One of the more pervasive themes in the volume is the reduction or decentering of human agency in interpretation and an increased focus on nonhuman, mostly animal, agency. In my view, the authors have limited success in decentering humans—a daunting task for human scholars, especially in a discipline defined as studying the human past. Humans remain implicitly at the center as the scope of research is delimited by human interactions with other taxa. It is nevertheless productive to be reminded that humans are but one species among many going about their lives as best they can and entangled with each other—not just serving as resources. Pilaar Birch (Introduction) may be right that one of the greatest strengths of multispecies studies is providing a rubric that can bring disparate approaches and disciplines into conversation, even if they do not yet offer a coherent response to my opening question.