Katina Lillios has written a remarkable compendium of Iberian archaeology, covering the deep past through the Bronze Age, for this contribution to the Cambridge World Archaeology series. The book appropriately rekindles an old tradition, now largely dormant, of considering the archaeology of both Portugal and Spain together. The extremely long time span studied is unusual, and it allows the author to highlight the unique archaeology of Iberia in terms of the antiquity and relevance of the oldest hominin remains; the long-lasting survival of Neandertals in the Peninsula, the last place where they lived before extinction as a species; the Upper Paleolithic specialized occupation of the territory and the widespread appearance of cave and open-air rock art; the apparent collapse of social complexity during the Mesolithic; and the emphasis on the study of the emergence of hierarchy that characterizes the archaeology of late prehistory in Iberia.

The author's bibliographic command is impressive, with 1,665 references. The 112 figures that illustrate the text are generally well chosen and well placed (but not itemized in a list of figures). The index is exhaustive, with an (almost) anecdotic tendency to privilege English and Portuguese entries over Spanish. In fact, a subtle “Portuguese-centric” perspective appears in several instances throughout the book, which is a good correction to usual Spanish biases. On occasion, however, it creates a certain asymmetry, prominently in the case of archaeological theory, which could have been more extensively developed in the book.

Indeed, the relevance of theory in the archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula (in particular in the Spanish academy) is striking in the European continental context. The influences of new archaeology and historical materialism have greatly shaped archaeological ideas in Spain. A major example is the debate over the state. In the midst of social and political turmoil during the transition to democracy in Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s, important academic clusters began to identify the origins of state-level societies in Iberia and, what was more important, corresponding modes of economic exploitation and social differentiation, in the second millennium BC (Bronze Age), mostly in the southeast. The rest of the peninsula was largely observed as a peripheral area where social complexity increased at a slower pace. Today, positions are where they were: scholars continue to make arguments for or against the state in the southeast, but changing ideas about developments in what were formerly thought of as “marginal” areas are challenging dominant models of linear evolution of complexity and hierarchy in Iberian late prehistory.

Lillios's work deals with this specific debate, although one misses a stronger voice of her own positioning within it. Throughout the book, she seems careful to avoid any personal perspective on interpreting and organizing the overwhelming amount of data the book collects. Only at the end of the book does Lillios offer dynamic points of discussion (about mobility and migrations; cultural and chronological taxonomies; the need to go beyond the discussion over the state; landscapes; violence; and the relation between gender/age and power), and she hints at the brilliant possibilities for a social archaeology that Iberian prehistory offers. Her largely neutral narrative positioning creates friction in a number of instances—for example, in the role of migrations to make sense of Iberian prehistory. Migrations have been proposed to explain the early arrival of people to the Peninsula, approximately 1.4 mya and during the Paleolithic (up to 12,000 BP [sic]); the origins of the Neolithic (ca. 5600–3000 BC [sic]); shared cultural developments in Iberia and elsewhere in Europe during the Chalcolithic (ca. 3000–2000 BC); and the spread of metal use and other potential cultural impacts in the Bronze Age (ca. 2000–700 BC) and the Iron Age (ca. 700 BC–AD 0). In her final chapter, Lillios gives an interesting critical assessment of how “mobility” (or migration) should be contextualized within broader social narratives rather than cited as a one-size-fits-all explanation for patterns of change in Iberian prehistory. Nonetheless, when considering the initial Neolithic, she seems to accept an explanation of Neolithic origins driven by migrations from Italy during the sixth millennium BC.

The question is not, of course, if people were in contact throughout the Western Mediterranean. The key issue is whether migrations explain (or are explained by) the Neolithization of the Iberian Peninsula. In my view, the Iberian Neolithic record offers an extraordinary opportunity to rethink how we choose to interpret archaeological continuities and discontinuities. The same is true of the Beaker phenomenon (or campaniforme, a term not mentioned in the book; ca. 2700–1700 BC) during the Chalcolithic period, which shows a widespread and penecontemporary appearance in the record of a specific package of material culture (including Beaker pottery as well as metal and stone adornments and utensils) throughout most of Western Europe and the Peninsula. Although this archaeological phenomenon is discussed extensively in Lillios's book, it would have been interesting to see it presented much more strongly as an opportunity to imagine the broad social and historical processes that explain this kind of materiality, beyond traditional migrations.

A narrative emphasizing the social and historical processes that shaped Iberian prehistory, more than a sometimes fragmented description of the archaeological record, and a clearer statement of where Lillios positions herself in relevant debates would have enhanced the impact of this otherwise valuable synthesis. This volume's encyclopedic scale and scope has both strengths and unavoidable weaknesses. Handbooks help crystallize hegemonic perspectives that can have considerable power in shaping the state of knowledge and research (in the book, a more critical approach to current debates of Neandertal rock art would have been interesting, for example). Still, the wealth of data that Lillios has put together does allow for cracks in knowledge to widen and alternatives to prevailing ideas to arise. Lillios has composed a truly comprehensive reference for current and future students and scholars of Iberian prehistory.