In An Archaelogy of the Troubles, Laura McAtackney analyzes one the most controversial places in Northern Ireland identified with the decades of civil conflict, 1968–98. The Maze/Long Kesh incarcerated some 10,000 men from 1971 through 2000. This number included loyalists dedicated to preserving union with Great Britain and Irish republicans intent on breaking that connection. But in the public eye, it is most commonly associated with the death of ten republican hunger strikers in 1981. Most notably, the death of Bobby Sands, elected Member of Parliament while on hunger strike, started a chain of events with effects felt to this day by means of provisions set down by the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement.

Prior to this publication, the best study of the site in material terms had been Louise Purbrick's essay “The Architecture of Containment” in Donovan Wylie's 2004 photographic volume The Maze (91–110), which is not readily available as a stand-alone piece. Since then there have been a number of academic publications about the Maze/Long Kesh, but most have been journal articles. McAtackney's volume, which draws on developments and sources through 2012, is thus a substantial contribution. Its stated archaeological approach should not deter those from other disciplines.

In the book's eight chapters, McAtackney casts a broad analytical net. In chapter 1, which contextualizes the Maze/Long Kesh within the Troubles, she includes a concise analysis of its role and influence on local society, politics, economics, culture, and media. In chapter 2, she justifies her methodology. As an archaeologist, McAtackney takes a “material approach to the site's significance” (36) within an “unfolding post-conflict” (38) environment. However, she has to use considerable ingenuity. The political context helps explain the highly restricted site access for the public and researchers, including McAtackney. Hence, drawing on elements beyond the site itself is the only way extensive exploration of the Maze/Long Kesh in material terms could be undertaken independent of direct supervision and monitoring by site authorities.

Consequently, in the next two chapters McAtackney does not analyze the site itself; instead, she considers records and artifacts. In chapter 3, she focuses on two different types of documents. The first are from official files at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and the United Kingdom's National Archives. However, these are neither comprehensive nor fully available, in part due to security concerns; in fact, the United Kingdom's 30-year rule means that government documents after 1982 were inaccessible to McAtackney (59–60). The second are prisoner communications, “scraps of paper, covered in . . . information to be forwarded around or beyond the prison” (79), which McAtackney accessed as photocopies (1979–81) at PRONI and originals (mainly 1980–81) at a republican community center.

These documents cover one of the site's defining moments, the hunger strikes. But another was the run-up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998, when the prison played an important role in the peace process, including a visit by the then British secretary of state, Mo Mowlam. Her papers could have helped provide “multiple perspectives” (62) and were publicly available at the Teesside Archives in 2012 when the book was being drafted.

In chapter 4 McAtackney looks at site artifacts, especially those seized from prisoners, now held by the Northern Ireland Prison Service. There is additional analysis of prison-issue items—“often mass-produced, cheap, generic” (122)—using largely documentary sources, as well as brief mention of post-closure artifacts. These were items left after 2000, some of them pilfered by visitors.

Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the site itself. Chapter 5 focuses on three types of buildings: the compounds, used prior to purpose-built prison buildings; the H-blocks, with construction completed in 1978; and the H-block prison hospital, where the hunger strikers died. Other buildings, such as the prison chapel and administration block with emergency control room, are not discussed here, although they are listed for preservation along with an H-block, the hospital wing and a (relocated) Nissen hut from one of the compounds. McAtackney's analysis of the hospital wing is done through the lens of its overt linkage to republican iconography, which also explains why this building is the most controversial. Hence no mention is made of another part of the wing with a padded cell; its use certainly fell outside the script of a hagiographic, political narrative. Chapter 6 analyses landscapes of the prison and local area, as well as landscape memories and representations.

In chapter 7 McAtackney considers the study overall in terms of dark heritage, linked to “the growing tourist appetite for consuming sites of death and destruction” (226). Much of it is very interesting, especially conceptual application of the “distributed self” which theorizes personhood to include networks of relationships with things as well as people (245). Indeed, an expanded version of this discussion could have been an innovative chapter in its own right.

But this chapter is also occasionally problematic. For example, McAtackney's assertion as to what “the future of the site now focuses on” (242) is outdated. Meanwhile, the view that a community museum—in this case one established by a former high-ranking member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (260) in the republican Falls Road area—indicates “a contestation of current official policies” (264) is questionable. Given the close relations between former paramilitaries of the Provisional IRA, community activists and Sinn Féin, one of the dominant parties now in power in Northern Ireland, it is likely that such a museum instead does tend to articulate an “official interpretation” (264).

Chapter 8 concludes with a case-study of one in situ artifact—the deathbed of Bobby Sands in the hospital wing—and a summary overview. Here McAtackney locates the volume firmly within the practice of archaeological enquiry. But she also believes that, while a site like the Maze/Long Kesh “should create emotional responses . . . if sensitively and appropriately considered . . . [it] can be used as a means of facilitating cross-community dialogues and understanding” (278).