This ambitious book focuses on the collective memories and so-called counter-memories of three eastern Mediterranean societies—Egypt, Greece, and Albania. Primarily interested in archaeological records before the medieval Ottoman conquests beginning in the fourteenth century AD, Michael Galaty traces the long-standing cultural development of “memory systems” and their discontents in each of these historically interconnected polities. As Galaty argues, memories that linger from as far back as the Neolithic can be reanimated (or quelled) in these countries through practice, policy, and rhetoric, some of which targets the beliefs of national minorities. Even with the post-9/11 advent of new would-be states, memory remains a crucial yet contested field that can undergird—or alternatively, undermine—political legitimacy. Consequently, Galaty's arguments are based on research that is both geographically broad (from the Red Sea to Selma, Alabama) and temporally deep (7000 BC–AD 2018).

The neurocognitive analytic of memory and its relevance for the materialist concerns of archaeology are therefore crucial to Galaty's work, which raises the question, How and in which ways do memories relate to human material remains? Galaty is definitive: archaeology is “memory work,” and material records, including those found at sites, relate to memory of an array of different types “more or less open to manipulation and control” (p. 9).

In particular, Galaty is interested in a broad typology of memory that he draws from other scholars in the field, and he sees relative openness to “counter-memory” as a cultural strength that he maps onto social groups and state formations. According to Galaty's evolutionary model, traditional memory regimes and forms of social organization are eventually co-opted by budding political elites, at which point, collective memory making supports the self-understandings and goals of centralized states (p. 11). To Galaty, this is crucial to the formation of state identities. In his materially conscious and poetic words, kitchen gods are then replaced by sky gods. And what any society remembers need not be empirically verifiable through fact-based evidence. Memories only need to be believed to be relevant to and efficacious in their respective historical contexts. Although we commend Galaty's critiques of nationalist intolerance that extend to the contemporary United States, below we raise theoretical questions about the neat interrelationships between material records, national or religious cultures, and corresponding so-called memory systems.

In Chapter 2, Galaty argues that collective memory systems in Egypt were geared toward centripetal unification in the face of a range of external threats. Despite imperial attacks that at times targeted heterodox Egyptian culture, material records, visual media, and syncretic Coptic traditions preserved elements of Egypt's ancient collective memory systems. Nineteenth-century Mehmed Ali Pasha was aided by the advent of early archaeology in his efforts to mobilize the Pharaonic past to push back against Ottoman central authority,one of many historical instances in which Egyptian politics evinced a struggle over collective memory.

In contrast to Egypt, Galaty characterizes memory in Greece in terms of centrifugal tendencies and therefore diversification. By tying Minoan and Mycenean practices to the broader history of modern Greece, Galaty argues that archaeological remains interweave with both memory and myth. Galaty focuses on the Mani region, the archaeology of which points to considerable instability, suggesting the existence of competitive memory systems prior to and even after nineteenth-century independence. He moves quickly through distinct periods of Greek history—Classical, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman—describing and ranking each in terms of its openness to memory, which he argues is revealed in the material record.

Given the territory's relatively late statehood when compared to Egypt or Greece and its lack of historic integration into states to its east, south, and west, Albanian memory systems have proven “extremely flexible” (p. 146) and are organized under the heading of adaptation. Galaty describes the twentieth-century codification of the Kanun as an instance of traditional memory's persistence in Albania, which has a material analog in the boundary stones and mortuary practices to which the oral customary laws refer. Enver Hoxha's ascension as Party of Labor first secretary and prime minister during World War II signaled the totalitarian closing of once-open memory systems, and the nation-building efforts became tied to a new national imaginary.

Galaty's close attention to material specificities, ethnic diversity, and memory-centric arguments make for dense prose and raise broad questions. We wonder whether some of his analysis might be better served by further emphasizing other theoretical idioms in his book (e.g., hierarchy, ideology, doxa, differentiation, resistance, among others). The point here is not to add more abstract analytics but rather to emphasize ones that further illuminate Galaty's impressive archaeological and historical knowledge. Despite statements to the contrary, “collective memory systems” (p. 2), which he draws from close engagement with Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Assmann, seem to stand in for another abstract analytic—“culture”—which witnessed its great critical unpacking during the 1980s when its uses and abuses were widely chronicled. Such theoretical lenses are also tied to, dependent on, and often inextricable from memories of innumerable sorts. However, if all practices that establish relationships to the past are reduced to the analytic “memory,” their diverse temporal and social dimensions can go obscured. Relatedly, can Egyptian, Greek, and Albanian (or, for that matter, any social) relationships to collective memory through time be generalized in national terms, ranked, and categorized in terms of unification, diversification, and adaptation?

As an analytic idiom, “memory” has driven a great deal of scholarly research in recent decades, including since Pierre Nora's influential essay on the “lieux de mémoire” that first appeared in English in 1989. Scholars of memory studies should attend to Galaty's original contribution to the literature, one that takes seriously a vast array of material remains from the distant and more recent past and contemplates their relationships to present-day, often exclusivist boundaries.