This book takes on a formidable task, distilling various branches of contemporary theory variously described as “ontological realism,” “posthumanism,” and “new materialism.” This massive body of theory is far from cohesive, and the contributors do an excellent job of making these otherwise complex concepts more accessible to the “uninitiated” reader, who may feel perplexed by it all. The introduction summarizes the four main themes of the book—relationality, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms. These are beefy subjects, and the intellectual history is glossed over pretty quickly. For this reason, this book is more appropriate for a reader at or above the graduate level who is already familiar with processualism, post-processualism, phenomenology, and other core theory in archaeology.

The five authors conduct archaeology in Europe and North America. Because the primary focus of the volume is theory, geographic case studies receive more limited treatment, used mostly to ground the abstract concepts being presented. An introduction and conclusion bookend 10 chapters, five written by individual contributors paired with five multiauthored chapters. The latter aim “to open up theory to dialogue, to capture something of its ongoing and shifting becoming” (p. 2). In this way, the book is a kind of Deleuzian thought experiment—in the mode of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work is highly influential to the new materialists, emphasizing emergent relations that are always in a “process of becoming” (p. 20). Yet, the dialogue and short biographies in the introduction also hearken back to the self-reflexivity of post-processualism, providing a window into the authors’ “sensibilities and situatedness” (p. 166). At times, the dialogue becomes a little overly (self-)consumed with decolonizing one's own Western “metaontology” (pp. 176–183), and it could have benefited from further consideration of Indigenous alterity and the very real challenges of “living in two worlds” that Lindsay Montgomery describes (p. 178). Overall, however, the discussions are beneficial in problematizing knowledge production and the politics and ethics of intellectual hierarchies that persist in archaeology.

Both Oliver Harris (Chapter 2) and Craig Cipolla (Chapter 10) are concerned with categorizing the different ways in which archaeologists use terms such as “relationality” and “ontology.” Harris defines three approaches to relations: epistemology (to reconstruct past worldviews), methodology (to reconstruct networks of relationships), and metaphysics (to reconstruct how the underlying world operates outside of human thought). Cipolla outlines four categories that overlap to some extent (pp. 169–171). In the intervening dialogue in Chapters 3 and 11, these “categories” of relations are critiqued. Although heuristically useful, they resemble essentialized and reductionistic “typologies” that are seemingly at odds with scholarship advocating (Deleuzian) flows and fluid processes. The differences in relational approaches seem to hinge on whether the field of ongoing relations in the world embody conscious or unconscious agents (pp. 17–19). The implicit assumption here is that thinking (as knowing subject) and doing (as bodily experience) somehow operate separately. Elsewhere, I argue that this kind of discursive (cognitive) versus nondiscursive (bodily) separation embodies a more radical theory of ontological alterity that risks perpetuating a mind/body separation (Harrison-Buck, Chapter 11 in Relational Identities and Other-Than-Human Agency in Archaeology, 2018).

An ontological reality that is not anthropocentric, static, or prefigured foregrounds the posthumanist perspective discussed by Sophie Moore (Chapter 6) and Rachel Crellin (Chapter 8). Humans are not privileged in this “post-anthropocentric” approach, and the subject/object divide is collapsed into a “flat ontology” (pp. 121–125). Some readers may find the dialogue in the intervening Chapters 7 and 9 somewhat abstruse, parsing posthumanist theory and endlessly debating what constitutes “new materialism.” In short, new materialism encompasses posthumanism and metaphysical or relations-centered approaches (Chapters 2 and 10) and emphasizes the complex “meshwork” of vibrant matter (soil, rocks, bodies, and countless other phenomena) as emergent and continually changing. The new materialist approach is favored among European archaeologists, perhaps because it sidesteps the problematic (mis)appropriation of Indigenous philosophies (Chapter 5, p. 71). Yet, as Benjamin Alberti notes in his essay, “Archaeologies of Ontology” (Annual Review of Anthropology 45:163–179, 2016), the “painstaking work of developing new archaeological metaphysics on the basis of an alternative Western intellectual tradition brings us no closer to grappling with the ontological difference presented to us anthropologically.”

Alberti's point is particularly relevant for archaeologists working in the Americas (presumably most readers of American Antiquity). Why would one not rely on Indigenous knowledge—not only as supporting evidence but as theory itself? This is what Lindsay Montgomery is advocating in Chapter 4. Scholars engaging in Indigenous ontologies should pay particular attention to this chapter and her keen observations throughout the book. Additionally, Cipolla (Chapter 10) offers a valuable discussion of collaborative Indigenous archaeology—not just as decolonized practice but as “shared ontological spaces”—what the Anishinaabe refer to elsewhere as “braided knowledge,” which weaves together complementary ways of knowing.

Importantly, contributors echo the sentiments of Métis scholar Zoe Todd (“An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29:4–22, 2016), who observes that most anthropological theory regarding relational ontologies derives from Indigenous knowledge, but Western intellectuals often fail to properly acknowledge Indigenous thinkers. This is what Cipolla might refer to as “creeping colonialism” (p. 173) and what Montgomery would call “epistemological injustice . . . [where] dominant systems of knowledge production shape the ways in which collaborative knowledge is evaluated, validated, and incorporated” (p. 174). Here, the dialogue (especially in Chapters 5, 11, and 12) is particularly effective in “dwelling longer in [the] discomfort” (p. 81) of our discipline's colonial baggage, addressing how the dominant Western perspective creates a divide in social theory and archaeological praxis, and perpetuates social divides between the disenfranchised and the privileged. Rather than seeking a neat and tidy singular (dominant) perspective, the authors of this book move the ontological project forward by advocating for more “openness” (p. 202), calling for greater inclusion, diversification, and decolonization of the field.