Anthropological archaeologists often consider their research with reference to current social and environmental situations. This effort helps to legitimize and contextualize the importance of our work to scholars outside the discipline. It offers the public consumer of archaeological knowledge a window into why what we do is important. Here, we might see some correlation with increases in the archaeology of climate change, migration, or social movements. However, in this second edition of The Mound Builders: Ancient Societies of Eastern North America (the first was published in 2004), George Milner chooses a different approach to making archaeology relevant. This approach does not rely on the complex jargon and minutiae of contemporary social, environmental, or political theories. It legitimizes itself among readers who are generally interested in the archaeological past for making deliberately accessible the last 10,000+ years of Native American history in North America east of the Great Plains.

Milner's second-edition synthesis of archaeological perspectives on mound-building societies of the Eastern Woodlands expands on the first. Revised sections include those on the peopling of North America, the complex Middle and Late Archaic mound centers, the story of food production, and new research on Mississippian iconography that has emerged in the last 15 years. Updates to the postcontact Indigenous presence—and interactions with European settlers in the Eastern Woodlands—are also included here.

This edition retains the chronological organization of its predecessor: a brief preface and chronological table precedes an opening chapter aimed to situate the reader in the rich archaeological history of eastern North America. Subsequent chapters cover Paleoindian and Early Archaic hunter-gatherers, complex mound-building hunter-gatherers in the Middle and Late Archaic, mound and enclosure builders in the Early and Middle Woodland periods, the rise of separated villages in the Late Woodland, the Mississippian florescence, late precontact villagers of the northern United States and Canada, and the interface with European colonization and forced removal.

Among the revisions that I found the easiest to recognize were the updated discussions of Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherer sites, Mississippian belief systems as derived from iconographic analyses, the expansion of food production during the Woodland period, and the nature of European-Indigenous relationships. The latter is most evident in the coverage of the Berry site, the principal town in the province of Joara and the location of Juan Pardo's Fort San Juan in western North Carolina. Another important change in this edition of The Mound Builders includes the removal of images of human remains. I also enjoyed seeing coverage of methodological advances that are becoming prominent in the archaeology of eastern North America, such as geophysical surveys related to Middle Woodland monuments and Mississippian towns.

This second edition of Milner's The Mound Builders offers a broad and compelling account of eastern North America's deep Indigenous history in a way that is comprehensible to the public in the eastern United States, including those who might live among or near a mounded landscape (as so many do) and find a connection to archaeology in that space. By taking this approach, Milner brings a degree of relevancy to archaeology by offering a generalized and thorough account of what we know about the deep histories of the land the modern American lives on. The book gives the interested public information to form personal reasons to care about the history of the land on which they dwell.

If I have any critique of this updated edition, it is the absence of Indigenous voices in it. Part of me was left wondering, What would the members of tribal nations that claim eastern North America as ancestral homelands want me as a reader to know about how they view the Indigenous built environments of their ancestors? Where do their perceptions of the archaeological past (their deep time history) fall in this narrative?

Beyond the public audience, The Mound Builders would be a great first exposure to the archaeology of eastern North America for undergraduate archaeology students (both majors and nonmajors). Nonacademic archaeologists who are new to working in the eastern United States would also find this book useful. Milner's The Mound Builders continues to be an excellent example of how archaeologists can effectively communicate what we study in a way that will engage many and diverse readers interested in learning more about the Indigenous past of the landscapes in which they live.