The premise of this book is that night is different from day. The editors and many of the contributors show, among other things, that embodied experience changes during the night, that people do different things at night than during the day, and that the values and meanings that frame these activities change after the sun has set. For the most part, archaeologists have not attended to these differences and have therefore missed out on major aspects of past human life. By plumbing these neglected realms of both ancient and recent history, this book follows in the footsteps of pioneering volumes on topics such as the archaeology of gender or the archaeology of childhood.

An archaeology of the night confronts challenges similar to those faced by these other archaeologies, and editors Gonlin and Nowell appropriately sought Meg Conkey to write the afterword. Conkey and other contributors to the volume emphasize several questions. When some of the same objects are used during both night and day, how do we parse these two temporalities? What aspects of nighttime are unexceptional, and what aspects are unique or even liminal? Is nighttime just as cultural as it is astronomical/biological/circadian, and if so, how do we come to terms with potentially endless semiotic variation? Opinions on these questions vary from chapter to chapter, with some authors (Kamp and Whitaker, Coltman) appealing to worldwide similarities (night is threatening and dangerous), and others (Wright and Garrett, Moore, Church) taking a more relativist stance (night can sometimes be feared, sometimes embraced). Indeed, the authors see some nighttime activities as esoteric and/or subversive (ritual, crime, witchcraft,) and some as quotidian (irrigation, travel/transport, baking, cleaning), though a nighttime activity such as smelting underscores the notion that the otherworldly and the mundane need not stand in opposition.

Coupled with this diversity of perspectives about the night is the temporal, geographic, and subdisciplinary (historical archaeology, experimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, archaeoastronomy, art history) diversity of the case studies. To their great credit, Gonlin and Nowell have brought together 18 chapters (not counting Conkey's afterword and a thoughtful foreword by Jerry Moore) from Africa, Asia, Europe, Polynesia, North America, and South America, ranging from the Paleolithic to the twentieth century. Chapters are grouped under five main themes (“Nightscapes,” “The Night Sky,” “Nocturnal Ritual and Ideology,” “Illuminating the Night,” and “Nighttime Practices”), though most chapters address more than one of these.

One way to advance an archaeology of the night is to focus on material culture closely associated with nighttime (kukui nut torches, fish oil lamps). Chapters by Van Gilder and Strong do precisely this. As with an archaeology of gender or childhood, though, many advances come not from a new batch of data or a new analytical technique but, rather, from challenging ourselves to look at the same data differently. Chapters by Dillehay and by Kamp and Whitaker do precisely this when they recognize that the sensory realm of the night (less emphasis on vision, more on hearing, smell, and touch) would have produced different interactions between people, leading to new kinds of social bonds.

In addition to bringing actors together, the night also differentiates among them. Many of the chapters leverage this point to make valuable contributions to a social archaeology. For example, Chirikure and Moffett discuss the formation of male and female identities in Iron Age sub-Saharan Africa through the use of differently gendered nighttime spaces. By looking at lunar alignments at the Emerald site in the context of feminine powers of the night, Susan Alt shifts the foundation of Cahokia from a male-based narrative to one that required balanced contributions from both men and women, day and night. Wright and Garrett argue that nighttime sewer work in the Mature and Late Harappan periods created and reinforced unequal social identities. Writing about Bahamian plantations in the nineteenth century, Baxter argues that the cover of night did not merely allow enslaved people to resist the social and economic order imposed upon them. It also allowed them to actively create their own identity and keep it hidden in order to protect its integrity and sanctity.

In sum, this is a deliciously rare book. It opens new paths of thought in a way that is both down-to-earth and fun. Among other things, readers learn about wick experiments in reconstructed Viking houses, sanitary workers in New York City, and Emperor Nero in disguise, roaming Rome's streets at night, physically assaulting unsuspecting passersby for pleasure. As Moore writes in his foreword, the chapters provide “exploratory, eclectic, and initial steps” but do not deliver a “focused inquiry” (p. xxi). Nevertheless, a book like this makes archaeology exciting again by showing that there are still neglected realms to be found and explored.