Joanna Brück has been at the centre of theoretically driven studies of the British and Irish Bronze Age for the past two decades. Her work has been deeply influential both in Bronze Age circles and far beyond because of her theoretical writing, particularly on ritual (Brück Reference Brück1999). Her focus on relational identities and personhood cleared the way for the emergence of current relational approaches. She has effectively created and promoted a very different view of the Bronze Age from the dominant narrative. Her Bronze Age is not one filled with entrepreneurial traders, violent young warriors, or aggrandizing and Machiavellian chiefs. She has deconstructed these characters and shown them for what they are: problematic, modernist, capitalist caricatures (Brück & Fontijn Reference Brück, Fontijn, Fokkens and Harding2013). Personifying Prehistory: relational ontologies in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland is the culmination of two decades of work by a true leader in the field. The book is richly illustrated throughout with line drawings, mostly by Anne Leaver. This is the first book-length treatment of the British and Irish Bronze Age and is sure to become a standard text for scholars.

In the opening chapter, Brück is very clear about what the book is and is not. The book does not try to be comprehensive, or to deal with the diversity of regional practices we see in the British and Irish Bronze Age (though I would argue that it actually offers an excellent overview). Brück states that her primary focus is to explore ‘relational concepts of the self’ (p. 13). She also openly acknowledges her own role in the creation of the narratives she offers, clearly situating herself as someone with her own interests and agenda. She notes an experience at a conference when she realized she and a female colleague were presenting papers about roundhouses whilst male colleagues were presenting papers on landscapes. The experience led her to realize her own interest in domestic architecture stemmed from her own gendered experiences in the present and offered her a way of problematizing contemporary gender relationships and assumptions. She goes on to state that: ‘I cannot hope to write an objective account of the Bronze Age and that my own interests and concerns inevitably mean that what follows can only ever be a very partial description of the period’ (p. 15). This is something she has been turning to her advantage in numerous papers over the past 20 years as she has used the Bronze Age as a way to explore alternative ways of understanding personhood, gender and relations. This has both reshaped the past and offers the potential for us to question and problematize the present.

As we have come to expect from Brück, the text avoids imposing modernist biases and ontologies onto the past. She once again takes aim at Cartesian dualisms, from nature/culture to subject/object, and each chapter effectively uses archaeological data to show how problematic they are. In chapter 2 she focuses on burial practices, critiquing the traditional individualizing model of identity (in both the Bronze Age and the present) and replacing it with a relational model, whilst at the same time effectively providing a critique of part/whole dualisms. In chapter 3 she explores the changing relationship between people and things, first through Early Bronze Age grave goods and then through patterns of fragmentation and exchange in the Middle and Late Bronze Age—the people/thing and related subject/object dualisms are deconstructed in the wake of her analysis. In chapter 4, she turns her attention to the domestic sphere; this chapter explores how Bronze Age understandings of the domestic differ from our own, considering themes such as gender, privacy, community building, and refuse. Her analysis questions the ritual/mundane divide and that between people/buildings, showing that domestic spaces were arenas for both the creation of identities, the navigation of politics, ritual practices, and the living of ‘mundane’ everyday life. Chapter 6 explores Bronze Age landscapes, taking us from the Early Bronze Age mortuary landscapes of barrows, to places of transformation, and the development of field systems in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, before moving on to a discussion of human–animal relationships. At the conclusion of the chapter, she deconstructs the nature/culture division.

The Bronze Age that Brück tells us about is not the same one we read about in more traditional interpretations of the period. Her narrative is not patriarchal or masculinist, not driven by the accumulation of capital or the growth of violence, nor is it about elites and hierarchy. Brück demonstrates not only the problems with these approaches from a theoretical perspective (chapter 1), but then goes on to demonstrate that her alternative reading of the evidence allows a very different narrative to emerge. Brück is careful throughout not to assume that the same gendered relations which exist today were relevant or real in the past (e.g. pp. 87–8, 116, 142–4). It is therefore a little surprising that Brück joins numerous other Bronze Age specialists (e.g. Brodie Reference Brodie1997; Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen1998; Kristiansen & Larsson Reference Kristiansen and Larsson2005; Needham Reference Needham2005; Parker Pearson et al. Reference Parker Pearson, Sheridan, Jay, Chamberlain, Richards and Evans2019) in choosing to write about marriage several times in the book (pp. 101–8, 145, 228–9, 231, 234). Brück's discussions of marriage focus on exchange and the creation of intergroup relationships. Marriage has played a key role in many narratives of the Bronze Age for a number of years now, from arguments that the spread of Beaker pottery was the result of marriage exchanges (Brodie Reference Brodie1997) to those that suggest intermarriage was key for the integration of new migrants and that indigenous groups might have offered their women as wives to migrants in order to secure access to metals (Needham Reference Needham2005). I argue that it is time for a critical reconsideration of the term: what do we mean by ‘marriage’ in Bronze Age contexts? The continued discussion of marriage in the Bronze Age is heteronormative—it makes marriage appear as a timeless institution and supports an eternal model of gender relationships. There are, of course, possibilities for re-imagining marriage in alternative ways, but in the wider Bronze Age literature it is implied to be (though never explicitly defined as) a long-term, exclusive relationship between a man and a woman which should produce children. Bronze Age specialists should look to reconsider and theorize this concept in a manner akin to how Brück herself has critically considered binaries and gender in her research.

Brück's work crosses boundaries—she has the command of the material to talk about both the Irish and British Bronze Ages with ease. She successfully draws together material from academic research projects as well as developer-funded excavations. Her analysis questions the usual Early/Late Bronze Age, burial/settlement divide as she reframes the evidence to discuss both Early Bronze Age domestic and Late Bronze Age mortuary evidence. She also effectively erases the lines that are often drawn between theory and material—in her text there is no interpretation of material that is not shaped by the theoretical framework she has developed. I have found myself frequently referring to the text in my own research and have set this book as one of the core texts in a module focusing on Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. The text both teaches the Bronze Age to students and is a stellar piece of research. This boundary blurring is perhaps what we should expect from a scholar who has spent decades critiquing Cartesian dualisms. It brought me great pleasure to be able to set a text for my students that is able to take them so effectively on a journey through the Bronze Age, replete with data and case studies, but which also, crucially, offers a radically different and politically engaged view of the period.