The archaeology of the European Iron Age has long had a strong counterculture, resisting and challenging perceptions that social complexity equates with hierarchy. Borne on a wave of post-processual perspectives, and taking inspiration from a range of ethnographic, anthropological and sociological concepts, as well critiques of the Celtic chiefdom model, many visions of the Iron Age have called into question narratives centred on the role of elites, tribes and hierarchy. As it is 25 years since J.D. Hill and Chris Cumberpatch (Reference Hill and Cumberpatch1995) published their important contribution to those critiques, the appearance of this new edited volume, centred on similarly non-triangular visions of society, is timely.

Alternative Iron Ages is a three-part volume comprising 17 papers. Papers in Part I, preceded by an insightful preface by Timothy Earle, include theoretical perspectives, historiographic overviews (Angelbeck; Currás & Sastre; Collis) and ethnographic comparisons (Dueppen). Part II comprises focused regional studies, and Part III, somewhat unusually for European Iron Age studies, includes comparative visions from the Mediterranean. A chapter by John Collis, a pioneer in challenging Celtic chiefdom models of European Iron Age society, is rhetorically titled ‘Reconstructing Iron Age societies: what went wrong’. The answer, on the basis of the themes of chapters in this volume at least, is perhaps not very much. The contributors challenge notions that the Iron Age must have been hierarchical, presenting a range of alternatives that draw on a diverse array of concepts, including heterarchy (Mihajlović); deep rural societies (Parcero Oubiña et al.); egalitarianism (Sastre & Currás); segmentarity (Currás & Sastre); anarchism (Armit; Santos Cancelas); and house-societies (Sharples). Many also answer Earle's plea to engage with heterogeneous ethnographic sources with which to construct different visions (Dueppen; Angelbeck). The volume successfully challenges the simplistic myth of a dichotomy between peaceful egalitarian societies and warlike chiefdoms, while many papers expose the fallacy of an equation between social complexity and hierarchy (e.g. Angelbeck; Currás & Sastre; Dueppen). Both Earle's preface and the editors’ own chapter raise the important point that, far from hierarchy being the norm, non-triangular societies were incredibly common and, indeed, that their traits underpin many of the ways in which power and society were manifest in later periods. Reflecting some of the earlier deconstructions of chiefdoms, the house and household feature prominently as a locus of power and identity (Sharples). The volume also emphasises the benefits of the strong cross-pollination of theoretical perspectives between Spain and Britain that have been witnessed in the last 15 years, but several chapters also expand the debate geographically to Sardinia (Araque González), Holland (Kok) and the Balkans (Mihajlović).

So, what might John Collis be hinting at when he suggests something went wrong? His chapter cautions against the cultural-historical underpinnings of the Celtic social models that continue to dominate some traditions of Iron Age studies. Considering the vibrancy of this volume, however, and of other recent overviews of British and Iberian archaeology that have espoused similar critiques, we might ask whether the beast of the Celtic chiefdom has now been slain: the subversive become orthodoxy.

Perhaps where things have gone wrong, to borrow Collis's phrase, in European Iron Age studies concerns less what is in this volume and more what is missing from it. One concern is that, despite the circulation of many of the theoretical perspectives in this volume for over 25 years, Collis's paper is one of the few to touch on the relevance of these debates for the Iron Ages of France and Germany. That the volume contains no papers by scholars from, or working on, these regions is perhaps illustrative of the theoretical networks that scholars inhabit; of the papers in this volume, seven are by Spanish scholars, six from the UK, three from the USA, and one each from the Netherlands and Serbia. To some readers the implication might be that such alternative Iron Age social models are not translatable to other regions of Europe. Indeed, there are those who still assume that concepts such as heterarchy are only relevant to the Early and Middle Iron Age, in regions lacking rich grave goods or abundant material culture, and where an emphasis on communal monuments (e.g. hillforts or castros) makes egalitarian societies more justifiable. Chapters on Mediterranean Iberia (Grau-Mira; Burillo-Mozota & Burillo-Cuadrado) certainly reveal, however, the potential to move non-hierarchical visions away from those regions where they have long been applied. Considering that Carole Crumley developed her concept of heterarchy based on Late Iron Age Gallic society, the very place where the basis of the Celtic model was born—largely from Julius Caesar's description of Aeduan society—it remains surprising that ‘Alternative Iron Ages’ are rarely explored for such areas of Europe. Alternative perspectives are emerging, but there remains a distinct schism between these theoretical cultures in European Iron Age studies. One reason for this is, as Richard Hingley notes in his chapter, that we have been perhaps too ready to view perspectives of Iron Age social models as a dichotomy between levellers and hierarchs. The models examined in this volume offer, however, the potential for far greater nuance and complexity in our social models than such binaries imply. As Earle points out, ideas such as heterarchy need not lead to perceptions of societies as static, as often seems the case, but they could also envisage communities as dynamic and mutable. In fact, one of the most significant challenges for Iron Age studies is that articulated in Hingley's chapter: that many popular contemporary reconstructions of the European Iron Age continue to envision warlike chiefdoms, with the anarchic and broadly egalitarian visions explored in this volume having barely filtered into heritage displays or public consciousness since their rise in the 1990s.

This is a stimulating volume that illustrates how the debates of the last 30 years, over hierarchy and heterarchy, still focus the minds of many scholars of the Iron Age. The next challenges seem to be for these debates to have wider currency, across Europe—both temporally and geographically—while moving to more nuanced visions of society, focused more on the nature of power than on the application of broader ‘models’. In so doing, these ‘alternative Iron Ages’ may begin to break down real, perceived or imposed theoretical dichotomies, and perhaps consign the Celtic chiefdom to its place in historiography.