The exploration of identity and identity creation has become a regular part of a post-processual archaeological approach. It is an idea and a set of theories that can be taken in many directions and which can often prove as challenging and circular as it can be fruitful. The cover image sets up this difficult juxtaposition from the very beginning, with its at once familiar and jarring image (by Christy McNutt) of a routine image from an ancient red figure pot imposed upon a modern wine bottle. The sharp-eyed will immediately take this as a hint of things to come: this book will not be a straightforward exploration of the archaeological record.

This edited volume is tied together quite simply and effectively by its theoretical approach to the various ways of negotiating identity in the archaeological record. Indeed, it is somewhat more coherent than many others available, as the selections were carefully curated via a series of seminars and a workshop on the same theme held at the University of Glasgow in 2012. In the introduction, Adrián Maldonado and Anthony Russell take the usual editors’ privilege of noting the commonalities of the papers, though they more unusually highlight the differences and disagreements between their authors, commenting that the book should not be a ‘handbook, but ten ways of theorizing identity’ (p 1). Another strong theoretical trend obvious from the outset is the editors’ and contributors’ adherence to – even joyous experiences with – postmodern academia.

The foundations and backgrounds to the theories behind these papers are strongly and thoughtfully laid out in the introduction. Maldonado and Russell attempt to grapple with many theoretical questions here, ones that I, at least, think will never be resolved, but which should be asked. The querying of our own structures allows for theoretical change to happen – an ‘ongoing process of becoming’ (p 4) not only for identities in the past, but for our own disciplinary identities in the present. There are as many ways of being as there are becoming, individually, theoretically, disciplinarily, and this contemplation of theoretical approaches past and present contains the seeds of our futures.

As is appropriate for a volume titled Creating Material Worlds, the majority of the papers focus on materiality and material culture through varying frameworks, largely eschewing other approaches such as landscape contextualisation, and the spatial turn. However, a singular focus on materiality is not universal; actor–network theory, including a certain number of agency theories, is abundant, and individual papers embed varying theoretical approaches to their case studies. For example, Louisa Campbell’s chapter on Roman ceramics in non-Roman contexts in northern England (pp 215–40) provides a solidly applied case study, with Roman sherds from multiple vessels at single sites proposed as a deliberate part of a vessel’s lifecycle in societies whose abrupt influx of Roman material culture, and limited period of use, created hybridised objects and, possibly, societies (p 231). This chapter provides convincing ideas, particularly in the lifecycle of things, though the analysis could be expanded to include consideration of the ‘birth’ of these objects in their lifecycle (pp 224; 227–9) in a more meaningful fashion.

The bulk of the volume focuses on the creation, expression and becoming of identity through its expression in reaction to another or, in some cases, the ‘Other’, seen in frontiers, intersections, borders and boundaries between societies, both temporally and geographically. For examples, see: Maldonado on the bridging cultures of cist tombs in early medieval Scotland (pp 39–62); Erin Halstad McGuire on Norse migrant identities in Scandinavian Scotland (pp 63–87); Jeremy Hayne on the Nuragic, Phoenician and Etruscan drinking practices in Iron Age Sardinia (pp 107–34); Anthony Russell’s examination of Sicily and the greater Aegean identity in the Bronze Age (pp 153–174); and Beatriz Marín-Aguilera’s study of the Phoenician and southern Iberian identities in the Bronze Age (pp 195–214.) As A Bernard Knapp points out, this is a ‘tried-and-tested’ method of examining identity (p 242). In all these cases, the ‘tried-and-tested’ method is solid, although co-editor Maldonado’s bridging of temporal ‘Otherness’ and the conscious continuities between the late Iron Age and early medieval Scotland, with his healthy dose of spatial and material awareness, may be the most dynamic application here. Interestingly, co-editor Elizabeth Pierce’s chapter on ‘Belonging and Otherness in the Post-Viking North Atlantic’ also provides an opportunity to reapply the tried-and-tested method of examining self in relation to self, as the migrant communities of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands looked to a Christianized, European ‘self’ so as not to appear ‘other’ to their wider community and so avoid being ‘cut off from [their] known world’ (p 149). Brief mention of contact with the ‘other’ Thule (pp 139, 144), though, is tantalising and needs further exploration. In a volume dedicated to postmodern and post-processual approaches, a lack of a postcolonial analysis of this search for Norse identity in contrast to – or even, at times, under threat from – the Thule is an omission.

All the chapters work with early materials, ranging from prehistoric to post-Rome and post-Viking periods. My one relatively minor quibble, borne undoubtedly of my own areas of research, is a lack of chapters using more firmly historical archaeological contexts. This may be a fault of the title rather than the volume itself; Creating Material Worlds: the uses of identity in archaeology implies a wider disciplinary spread than the book covers. Such a strong theoretically oriented volume could have widened its temporal scope without diluting its coherence or impact.

But readers with the willingness to do so will find the ideas and theories applicable to their own work regardless of geographic or historical (or prehistorical) period. This is an excellently conceived and considered volume. The chapters are not only produced with thoughtfulness and intelligence, but provide a certain piquancy and challenge to the theoretical approach of those working throughout archaeology and material culture studies.