Jameson and Musteaţă's volume is an important addition to an emerging genre evaluating the theoretical, practical, ethical, and political implications of public or community archaeology. Some of those books are narrowly focused geographically (Moshenska and Dhanjal, Community Archaeology: Themes, Methods, and Practices, 2012; Gürsu, Public Archaeology: Theoretical Approaches and Current Practice, 2019), whereas others attempt a broader perspective (Okamura and Matsuda, New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology, 2012). What distinguishes this volume is its sheer scale and scope: 60 contributors to 29 chapters, covering case studies ranging across every part of Europe, the length and breadth of Africa, colonial and Indigenous North America, Mesoamerica, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Although case studies from Asia would have been welcome, the book comprehensively addresses the issues concerning community-based archaeology around the globe.

As many contributors to the volume point out, engagement with the public is now embedded in the ethical practice of archaeology. Long past are the days when archaeological projects were designed and led by scholars and technical experts with little reference to local sensitivities—and executed by professionals, students at field schools, or underpaid and ill-informed local residents. Archaeologists today debate when and how to engage members of the public, how prominent a role community members should play in project design and execution, and what outcomes from community engagement are ethically necessary or practically achievable. Jameson and Musteaţă's volume constitutes a substantial platform from which to compare alternative approaches by illuminating the consequences of different contexts for ethical and practical community engagement.

Each chapter delivers compelling stories and data, but the book is most valuable when read across the chapters and section divisions. Case studies by archaeologists working in Europe or parts of the United States, for example, illustrate how affluent cultures rooted in enlightenment values generate goals and practices in community engagement that focus on such values as education, well-being, or social interaction. Those chapters suggest that “empowering” such communities in archaeological research means allowing individuals to participate in excavations and data analysis either to augment outside experts with their own skills or to have the opportunity to observe and be educated on the research through community “outreach.” In contrast, chapters by archaeologists working with Indigenous, traditional, or subaltern communities describe very different mandates for community engagement, unique political obstacles—especially if projects challenge an Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD)—and complex ethical considerations. “Empowerment” in such cases may mean ceding substantial control over project design to traditional communities, sharing interpretive analysis with—if not subordinating it to—local community members, and even facilitating political challenges to the AHD.

Jameson and Musteaţă along with their contributors have not resolved these complex issues, but they have arguably set the stage for the next advance in archaeological engagement with the public. An unproductive effort to distinguish “community” from “public” archaeology surfaces throughout the chapters, but it is a minor distraction that points to the broader matter: the ethical and practical issues relate not to disciplinary inside baseball, but to establishing cross-disciplinary approaches that enable archaeologists to relate ethically and effectively with communities. Particularly because this volume comes on the heels of a large number of journal articles and case study–based books on public and community archaeology, we may now have enough data from enough parts of the world and enough different historical, political, cultural, and economic contexts to see the outlines of a future agenda.

Indeed, Jameson, in his brief introductory chapter, attempts to sketch the contours of that project, cataloguing the issues resulting from archaeological collaboration with communities: multivocality and power sharing; knowledge making and new narratives; the role of elites, politics, and the AHD; and the nature of community participation itself. The next dimension of this discourse is to plumb the now ample case-study data for theoretical insights into the best ways to vary the form of public engagement in response to variations in social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. The next dimension is to develop heightened clarity on the goals of community/public archaeology, the metrics by which successful impacts will be measured, and the techniques that can be used to measure them. The next dimension will take us beyond archaeology as it was to archaeology as it must become. For that, the essential contribution from Jameson and Musteaţă's book is that it delivers a capstone to past publications and in so doing, begins to make the next dimension conceivable.