Reflecting a resurgence of debate around the value of archaeology (e.g. Sabloff Reference Sabloff2016; Barrett Reference Barrett2021; Barsky Reference Barsky2022), the first volume under review is the boldly titled Bigger than history. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani challenge the view held by some that archaeology is an indulgent pastime, making the case for the discipline's importance to wider society. The volume opens with a chapter that takes the reader on a tour of deep history, charting the advent of palaeoarchaeology and outlining the milestone discoveries that have shaped our understanding of humankind: the evolution of Homo sapiens, the use of tools, migration around the globe, the beginnings of agriculture, and the first cities. The chapter is not designed to present these discoveries in detail, but rather to use these remarkable foundations as a springboard for the questions to which the authors turn next: what makes us human? What can we learn from the past? How can knowledge of the past improve our present, or indeed, the future? Questions which the subsequent chapters go on to answer.

Chapter 2 deals with arguably one of the most significant challenges for the modern world: climate change. Fagan and Durrani argue that archaeology's perspective of huge timespans allows a unique understanding of the variety of ways that societies have adapted to major climatic shifts in the past. Considering glacial and inter-glacial swings, irregular warming and droughts, the authors follow others such as Erika Guttmann-Bond (Reference Guttmann-Bond2019) in highlighting archaeological examples of how humans have adapted to and survived environmental change. The following chapters (3–5) deal with questions of identity and difference, addressing how archaeology can act as a lens through which hidden societies can be viewed. Gertrude Caton-Thompson's work at Great Zimbabwe is discussed as an example of how archaeology can debunk theories grounded in racist attitudes, while William Evans's work on the Chinese Summit labourers in North America shows how archaeology can reveal invisible communities and hidden voices from the past.

Challenging androcentrism and rethinking gender relations are considered in Chapter 4, in which the authors argue that better understanding of archaeological evidence for powerful women in the past can help us resist attempts to perpetuate inequalities in the modern world. The volume also deals deftly with archaeology and nationalism (Chapter 5) through looking at how archaeology can be used as a tool against fabricated pasts that are created to shore up nationalist agendas. The impact of archaeology on tourism—and the impact of tourism on communities and archaeological sites—are addressed in Chapters 6 and 7, which consider, among other things, the treatment of human remains, inclusivity in heritage presentation and the protection of heritage for the future.

The final chapter reaffirms the ways in which archaeology as a discipline has the tools to counter divisive and damaging ideas and to be “a powerful weapon against bigotry” (p. 106). The conclusion to this optimistic volume is that our archaeological perspective on deep history should give us hope. Fagan and Durrani conclude that, as archaeologists, “our job is to present the past as accessible and as something we all have a share in” (p. 114)—certainly something the authors achieve in this book. While the volume draws on existing archaeological knowledge and theory, its presentation of complex arguments in an accessible format offers a window onto this subject for a readership beyond archaeologists that will help to clarify the discipline's broader relevance. This is surely a book that everyone should read.

This volume emerges as part of what has been called archaeology's ‘mobility turn’, as detailed in recent volumes by Martin Bell (Reference Bell2020) and Oscar Aldred (Reference Aldred2021), and more generally in the increasingly widespread, sometimes controversial, studies using ancient DNA and isotopes to examine movement in prehistory (e.g. Parker Pearson Reference Parker Pearson2016; Booth Reference Booth2019; Armit & Reich Reference Armit and Reich2021). The aim of the volume is “to further develop methodologies that can help us to engage with and rethink the middle spectrum of mobility that sits between what are often presented as the mundane local and the exciting exotic” (p. 4), thus adding a particular contribution to the ‘mobility turn’. Catriona Gibson opens the volume with an introductory chapter that sets out the current state of mobility studies, detailing ways that movement has been approached and methodologies that have been applied to its study, such as isotope and ancient DNA analyses. Gibson also outlines the challenges facing scholars of movement and mobility. These include the selected archaeological sample areas that do not necessarily intersect with ancient routeways, the under-theorisation of movement—particularly movement on foot—and the focus on either micro- or macro-scale mobilities that leaves a significant gap in our understanding of localised movement. Gibson's chapter begins to bridge this gap with case studies that show how a multi-layered approach to data (such as Deep Mapping) can reveal longer cycles of mobility.

The following 10 chapters each highlight different approaches to movement. Yolande O'Brien (Chapter 2) considers Irish mythology to demonstrate how the processes of negotiating a landscape are bound up with recognition and learning through perception of place. O'Brien's study shows that movement is not an abstract exercise, but “an interaction with shared culture and identity, accumulated and developed from the earliest interactions with the landscape” (p. 24). Oscar Aldred (Chapter 3) turns from the cognitive to the material to examine the ‘material footprints’ that cross an Icelandic landscape. For Aldred, approaching the journey as a shared space between archaeologist and past traveller allows movement to become the praxis. In this way, materials systems and mobile bodies are aligned to present a better understanding of the past. The mechanisms of movement are the focus of Peter Clark's chapter (4) on the Dover Bronze Age boat as a representation of the importance of maritime mobility to the community that constructed it. The boat as a vehicle lends itself particularly well to thinking through the in-between—the journey rather than the endpoint.

The routine movement of everyday life is examined by Francesca Chelazzi (Chapter 5). Applying GIS and ‘hybrid archaeology’ and focusing on ‘reciprocity’ and ‘commotion’ (here read as the process of continuous interaction) in Bronze Age Cyprus, Chelazzi highlights the overlapping and cumulative connections through which people inhabit and shape their own locality. Also focusing on the Bronze Age (although this time in Cornwall, UK) are Catherine J. Frieman and James Lewis, who consider overland wayfaring via barrow roads and the monumentalisation of pathways between communities.

The final chapter by Dimitrij Mlekuž considers holloways to understand how tracks and the broader landscape are mutually constituted as people moved from place to place in daily life. Reading these landscapes as ‘thick’, multi-temporal places can help us to understand them not as static networks of communication but as fluid and changing. Most importantly, says Mlekuž, we should view them as pathways to past landscapes. This volume adds an excellent contribution to renewed interest in mobility and movement, particularly in going some way to bridging the theoretical gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and demonstrating the importance of the journey.

In another consideration of the specifics of mobility in the past, Jeffrey Lerner and Yaohua Shi's edited volume, Silk Roads: from local realities to global narratives, provides a new approach to studies of the Silk Roads. Stepping outside of bounded temporal or geographic narratives, this volume aims to reflect the diversity of its subject by placing the emphasis on exchange and transformation along the Silk Roads. Rather than considering the Silk Roads as a single phenomenon, the papers here take an interdisciplinary and holistic approach, including both land and maritime routes, across the broadest chronological span.

The introductory chapter discusses the aims of the volume: to understand the Silk Roads as a series of interconnected social networks and to broaden the appeal of the topic to scholars interested in comparative studies of stateless societies. Lerner and Shi begin by defining terminology; the nineteenth-century term ‘Silk Road’ is used in the absence of a better alternative and because it is recognisable despite its misleading suggestion of a single route. The editors choose to use the plural (Roads) to reflect the many networks of land and sea trading routes represented. Five sections shape the volume, beginning with ‘Acculturation and Hybridisation’, in which papers consider frontier dynamics (Nicola Di Cosmo), cultural contacts and how the Silk Roads brought conflict as well as economic opportunity (Saba Samee). ‘Understanding Spice Through Interdisciplinarity’ (section two) demonstrates the advantages of interdisciplinary study. From the biological and chemical uses of spices (Wayne L. Silver and Cecil J. Saunders) to their impact on Venetian pharmacies (Monique O'Connell), this section investigates the spice foodways (Eric Dursteler) facilitated by the Silk Roads.

‘Tradition as Continuity and Change’ (section three) considers transnational communities (Margaret Sarkissian), new mobilities (Jennifer C. Post) and the contradictory ways that Silk Roads are used simultaneously as historical narratives of cosmopolitanism and also to legitimise nationalist and racist discourses (Chad Haines). ‘Cultural Transactions’ (section four) examines the redistribution of power and resources, and the fiscal systems that were in place, with a focus on Sassanid money (Touraj Daryaee) and the establishment of cashless payments (Dan Du). The fifth and final section investigates the rarity of long-distance commodity trade, with most trade and commerce practised at a more local level. Jeffrey Lerner examines the use of inland water systems for travel to consider the plausibility of written accounts by the Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos (first century BC), who claimed it was possible to use waterways to navigate from India to Germany, while John A. Ruddiman considers other maritime mobilities in an examination of Samuel Shaw's journals, which record his voyages to China during the later eighteenth century.

Lerner and Shi argue that “the time is ripe to begin formulating a new definition of the contour of Silk Roads Studies and laying a new foundation for further work in this field” (p. 1); this interdisciplinary volume with its broad-ranging content is certainly a very good start.

Presenting papers arising from two international conferences aimed at understanding “how people in Antiquity manipulated, transformed and engaged with their landscapes” (p. 2), and sacred landscapes in particular, this volume takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach and represents a sizeable corpus of studies, with 35 contributors. The chapters are divided into five sections dealing with: the manipulation of sacred sites, with a focus on monumentalising natural features; the transformation of sacred landscapes; ways in which landscapes are invested with meaning through myth and memory; ways that sacred landscapes are experienced; and how landscape, identity and social cohesion are shaped by and expressed in sacred landscapes. With so many chapters, necessity demands the selection here of just a few to highlight the diversity of approaches.

In the first section, the chapter by Leticia López-Mondéjar considers the strategic importance of cult places and how they were transformed during the Roman expansion into south-east Iberia in the third to first centuries BC. The author focuses on two case studies in the Murcia region that were monumentalised during the period under investigation: the sanctuaries of La Luz and La Encarnación. The sites differ in their styles, with La Luz following Hellenistic patterns and La Encarnación displaying a more Italic tradition. López-Mondéjar concludes that the two sites were used in different ways to negotiate power and identity in the face of Roman expansion. At La Luz, this entailed a reassertion of the identity of local elites by reinforcing existing traditions, while at La Encarnación, identities were redefined and renegotiated within a framework of Roman reference. Both, in their different ways, demonstrate the importance of sacred spaces in the negotiation of power.

The experience of sacred landscapes—in this case mountains—is addressed by Thomas Jansen (Chapter 24), who considers the consecration of mountainscapes through a gradual process of visitation by significant individuals, or, indeed, mythical creatures. The mountain thus becomes imbued with biographies or hagiographies and ritual acts which create memory. Jansen goes on to consider the contemplative process of climbing a mountain through a medieval (Tang Dynasty) Chinese poem. Ultimately, Jansen suggests that we move away from arbitrary demarcations between sacred and secular spaces and instead view sacred places as landscapes “formed through the crystallisation of all those daily activities, rituals, experiences and social connections we make across time” (p. 282). Following on from this, Katharina Zinn (Chapter 26) questions how cultural shifts affect sacred landscapes. Comparing two ancient Egyptian sacred landscapes, Abydos and Amarna, Zinn asks whether cultural shifts could ‘kill’ a sacred landscape. Comparison between the two sites reveals that while repeated cyclical ritual use of Abydos offered a deep memory that transcended cultural shifts, Amarna's socially created landscape—with only one primary human agent (the pharaoh)—did not have sufficient cultural memory to survive as a sacred place.

The 33 chapters give the volume an impressive chronological range, with case studies from the Bronze Age to the medieval period, as well as good geographical coverage. Editors Ralph Häussler and Gian Franco Chiai have curated an engaging volume that digs deep into the complexity of sacred landscapes.

Maritime archaeology has been highly productive in recent years and has often been at the forefront of media attention, seen most recently in the rediscovery of Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, and the release of haunting nineteenth-century photographs from the wreck of the SS Central America (the ‘ship of gold’) that sank off the coast of South Carolina. The visceral nature of shipwreck archaeology has perhaps led it to be less theorised than other areas of the discipline. This is a gap that the author of our next volume aims to address. Shipwreck hauntography approaches shipwrecks as sites of “fluid boundaries between past and present, sacred and secular, ‘nature’ and culture, and particularly life and death” (p. 13). Responding to what Rich sees as a lack of critical theory in nautical archaeology, the volume draws on the work of Graham Harman and Ian Bogost to suggest what are described as ‘hauntographs’ as a means to examine liminal objects that are simultaneously present and absent. For the uninitiated, hauntographs are curated images that act as “ontograph[s] for the revenant” (p. 81).

The chapters address particular aspects of hauntography through the lens of individual wrecks, with Chapter 1 deconstructing current approaches to archaeology and suggesting conceptual alternatives. The chapter considers weighty themes, such as the invention of the concepts of culture and nature, and the use of heritage to control narratives of the past, before concluding with the first two hauntographs featuring the eighteenth-century Ottoman shipwreck, the Nissia. In Chapter 2, connections between bodies and ships are explored to understand occidental approaches to underwater wreckage that may be biased by being rooted in Early Modern Christian theology. Here, the hauntographs represent the Yarmouth Roads wreck site in the Solent, UK.

The process of exploring shipwrecks is the focus of Chapter 3, in which Rich considers the uncanny and phantasmal experience of underwater archaeology—a process, it is argued, that dulls the senses, making underwater discovery a ‘dystopian phenomenology’. Here, the author challenges popular tropes of shipwrecks as haunted spaces, focusing instead on the encounter between wreck and archaeologist, and considering, in particular, the distortions in perception that are endemic in deep water. Reversing the imagery of death in shipwrecks, Rich turns to the ecological role of wreck sites, which can become artificial reefs supporting aquatic life. The eighteenth-century frigate Santa Maria Magdalena, which lies off the coast of Viveiro, Spain, is the case study and also the subject of the hauntographs for Chapter 4.

Taking as its lens the Bayonnaise, a ship wrecked in 1803 off the coast of Finisterre, Spain, Chapter 5 deals with the virtues and drawbacks of 3D-digital reconstructions of shipwrecks. Here, Rich explores questions of anthropogenic miniaturisation, and the masking of the true cost of knowledge by the apparent ease of access provided by on-screen engagement with wreck sites. These virtual tours, argues Rich, result in a denial of bodily confines—the very physical circumstances that produce the uncanny dystopian phenomenological engagement with wrecks. Rich uses the postface to summarise the key argument of the volume: that contemporary nautical archaeology is influenced by its Early Modern origins in Christian theology. Inverting the resurrection imagery, Rich envisages wrecks as insurgents with agency in a continuing role in their sub-marine settings. This interesting volume has its complex theoretical underpinning woven through the prose, making it a very focused read, but patience is rewarded.

In a very different way, our next volume also explores how we deal with reconceptualising the past, this time through one of Scotland's most iconic monuments. My life as a replica reveals the biography of a 1970 concrete facsimile of the eighth-century St John's cross. With the original now displayed in the Abbey Museum, the replica has taken over sentinel duty outside the small chapel, known as St Columba's Shrine, on Iona. Foster and Jones's volume invites us to consider authenticity, value and significance, and how these are accessed through objects and material culture—including through replicas.

The volume is divided into three broad sections. The first, ‘Crafting lives’, sets out the motivation for the book and the ways in which the lives of objects—in particular, the St John's cross—can be constructed. This section includes discussion of the methodological approach and an in-depth consideration of Iona, focusing on the agency and symbolism of the island's carved stones. Section two, ‘Creating and cultivating the cross’, focuses on the cross itself—the original and its replica—before the final section, ‘Celebration in concrete, celebration of concrete’, considers the role of replicas in the production and negotiation of authenticity and value.

Chapter 1 goes straight to the heart of the question of authenticity asking: what are replicas? Can they represent the original? And how much does authenticity matter? An in-depth discussion of the various approaches to authenticity follows, with the authors arguing that replicas “acquire their own cultural biographies while simultaneously contributing to the social lives of their original counterparts” (p. 10) and that replicas have a valuable role in providing authentic heritage experiences. Chapter 2 focuses on Iona as a place, a community and a destination for pilgrimage of a variety of types. This provides context for the biography of the St John's cross and its replica. Chapter 3, meanwhile, considers the heritage of Iona as the home of a vast collection of carved stonework. These are dispersed and fragmented, and, to a certain extent, contentious. Questions of the ownership, responsibility and appropriate preservation of this stonework are pertinent in understanding the biography of the St John's cross.

The life of the ‘original’ cross is carefully detailed in Chapter 4, supported not only by archaeological research, but also by the historiography of the cross's cultural impact on the island and beyond. The decision to create a replica and the debates surrounding the process are presented in Chapter 5, in which the authors unpack the value-laden terms used in discussions about the creation of the replica. Authenticity and completeness are emphasised, with several specialists employed to sanction the model for the replica before it was cast, and caution exercised about whether a copy might devalue or debase the original. Further thought was also given to how to instil a sense of ‘pastness’ to the replica while, at the same time, allowing it to be truthful as a copy.

The final chapters reflect on the material and social relationship of the cross to the contemporary community and wider society, highlighting how replicas of objects and monuments enhance heritage sites, and the ways in which these objects themselves take on meaning. The results of the ethnographic study, in particular, reveal fascinating insights into how attitudes to, and experience of, objects can be affected by the knowledge that they are replicas, and then reshaped by a fuller understanding of the research and thoughtful processes involved in constructing the replica. This makes it a useful case study for reflecting on the many replicas of monuments and artefacts around the world. As well as detailing the biography of an important monument, this excellent volume challenges ideas about authenticity and value in the presentation and interpretation of heritage.

Summing up, while Fagan and Durrani's volume argues explicitly for the value of archaeology within wider society, the other volumes reviewed here each subtly contributes its own specific case studies to illustrate that point. From understanding the landscapes we live in and move through, to recognising the power of heritage preservation and presentation in shaping cognisance of the past, archaeological knowledge underpins our understanding of who we are and how we came to be.

This list includes all books received between 1 January 2022 and 28 February 2022. Those featuring at the beginning of New Book Chronicle, however, have not been duplicated in this list. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its subsequent review in Antiquity.