The papers published in this attractive volume are an outcome of a 2015 conference on collaboration between the University of Tübingen in Germany, the German Archaeological Institute in Madrid, and Alcalá de Henares University in Spain. On a general level the collaboration addresses questions about the resources exploited by Chalcolithic communities in south-west and central Iberia, given the results of recent fieldwork, and how those resources and their exploitation are implicated in regional sociocultural dynamics. The south-west includes the lower Guadalquivir valley and Huelva, along with southern Portugal from the Lisbon peninsula south to the Algarve, while the central Iberia part focuses mainly on the Spanish provinces through which the Tagus river flows down to the Portuguese border. Both regions have seen more intensive fieldwork and many surprises during the last three decades. What might the study of resource exploitation tell us about similarities and differences between the two regions during the third millennium bc? At the same time, what can we infer about Chalcolithic social networks of different scales from exogenous raw materials and objects?

The papers consist of an introduction and synthesis (by Bartelheim & Bueno Ramírez), followed by six papers each on central and south-west Spain and two papers on a more peninsula-wide approach to specific raw materials. In the majority of case studies the authors attempt to integrate the results of field and geophysical survey with excavations of varying scales to situate sites and materials within their local and regional contexts, proposing both site and exchange networks. In central Spain, the discovery of ditched enclosures, including the largest one on the central plateau at El Prado (at least fifty, if not 100 ha in size) in Toledo (papers by Bueno Ramírez, Barroso Bermejo & de Balbín Behrmann, and Schmitt) extend the distribution of this site type in the interior of the peninsula. Further to the north in the Madrid region, Liesau provides a detailed study of a faunal assemblage from funerary and non-funerary contexts in a ditched enclosure, at the twenty ha site of Camino de las Yeseras, focussing on evidence for species used for consumption as well as evidence of structured deposition. Odriozola and colleagues situate their mineralogical analyses of the variety of green stone body ornaments found in the middle Tagus valley from c. 4500–2500 bc within the wider context of sources and distributions of variscite and other mineral groups in the Iberian Peninsula. Barroso Bermejo et al. present the evidence for salt production during the third millennium bc in the same area of the Tagus valley and again within a much wider peninsular context and speculation on the exchange of salt on a regional scale. Finally, López Sáez et al. publish palynological and archaeological data in support of increasing aridification from c. 2200 bc and its possible role in the transition from local Chalcolithic to Bronze Age communities in areas like La Mancha.

Enclosed settlements also loom large in the papers on southwest Iberia. The site of São Pedro in central Alentejo (not to be confused with Vila Nova de São Pedro to the north of Lisbon) has an alternating sequence of open and enclosed occupation phases and is proposed as the centre of a network of sites, including fortified settlements on its edges. Mataloto and colleagues trace the origins of raw materials used in everyday life, from local sources for materials such as clays and lithics to amphibolite from Extremadura, and reconstruct a model of non-specialised production. Recent excavations on what is described as a ‘farm’ at Cabeço do Pé da Erra, located on an island in a tributary of the Tagus river, show the presence of huts enclosed by a ditch and evidence for what also appears to be non-specialised production. According to Gonçalves and Sousa raw materials were both local and regional, with flint, amphibolite, and copper sources located over thirty km away. Carlos Valera focusses totally on the exogenous raw materials from the Perdigões enclosed site, reconstructing an exchange network drawing in materials from regions as far apart as the Lisbon area to the Betic mountains southeast of the Guadalquivir valley. Geophysical survey and excavations have been carried out on the settlement associated with the Alcalar megalithic tombs in the Algarve and this fieldwork (since the 1990s) and analysis of raw material sources is published by Morán, Parreira and Becker. Recent fieldwork on ditched enclosures in the Lower Guadalquivir is presented by Escudero Carrillo et al., but it is the ‘super-site’ of Valencina de la Concepción that gives us both the biggest challenges and yields. As García Sanjuán points out, the multiple excavations, finds analyses, and large-scale programme of radiocarbon dating give rise to caution about its function (e.g. domestic, ‘gathering place’), scale of production, position within a regional settlement hierarchy, and inferences about its socio-political structure. Detailed study of the raw materials used at Valencina shows the presence of a social and exchange network extending from the local area over a distance of 600 km within the Iberian Peninsula, and beyond this to the central and the eastern Mediterranean. This extra-peninsula interaction is the focus of Schuhmacher's study of ivory exchange networks linking Iberia to north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, while Murrillo-Barroso and Montero Ruiz study amber and copper objects in terms of their social value.

There are many positive points about this book and the project from which it derives. Regional studies of the later prehistory of Iberia have enabled us to grasp more securely variations in our knowledge of cultural sequences (especially in relation to the intensity of survey projects, the scale of excavations, and our understanding of why there are apparent gaps between periods), as well as the presence or absence of particular site types (enclosed by different means in the case of this volume). Comparison of regional sequences and their interpretation has been a relatively recent development (see Chapman, Reference Chapman2008). In many of the case studies in this volume there is a consistent attempt to construct patterns of site and exchange networks, in some cases showing the scale (from local to regional to extra-peninsular) of social interaction. Given the more isolated models of autonomous development that succeeded diffusionist explanations of cultural change in the 1970s (and I put my hand up as one of those responsible for that!) we are now getting a glimpse of how extensive and complex were exchanges of materials and artefacts. A useful addition to the contents of this book would have been study of more symbolic exchanges, including figurine styles and art (whether in the form of rock art in the landscape or in the interiors of megalithic tombs), setting the areas of study within a wider peninsular context. A chapter on population movement, its scale, extent and social context, as seen through the increasing number of isotopic analyses across Iberia in the third millennium bc (e.g. Díaz-del-Río et al., Reference Díaz-del-Río, Waterman, Thomas, Peate, Tykot, Martínez-Navarrete and Vicent2017), would also have strengthened the volume, as would a specific contribution on the theoretical approach behind the definition of the collaborative project and the key concepts used in it (they are presented rather succinctly in the introduction). The summary of ‘new questions for Chalcolithic research on the Iberian Peninsula’ (in Bartelheim and Bueno Ramirez's introduction) suggests directions for future research but we are probably only just scratching the surface. The collaborative project clearly has much work to do!