Randall McGuire has famously said that “There is no politically neutral archaeology.” This quote occurred to me numerous times reading these two excellent volumes and it works as a framing device to introduce them to a wider audience. The first way in which it is relevant is that the editors are quite clear that what they would like to do is move away from the methodologies that dominated Polish archaeology during the communist period and its concomitant focus on Slavs and Slavic civilization. The second way in which the quote is relevant is a continuation of the first, as the editors then make a positive statement through word and deed that what they would like to do is situate the region between the Oder and the Vistula, explicitly not called Poland in the title, in the larger ancient and early medieval world. This move away from nationalism and away from a focus on the Slavs created the preconditions for a volume that will be of use to scholars working on the Migration Period throughout western Eurasia.

The Migration Period between the Oder and the Vistula is the culmination of a six-year research project funded by the National Science Centre in Poland. The rationale for the project was that the history of the Migration Period (fourth-sixth centuries CE) has been understudied and misrepresented in this region. The final goal was to “investigate the causes of settlement change in central Europe on the cusp of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the cultural, social, demographic, and ethnic processes on the one hand, and environmental change on the other” (8). The project was made up of fifteen primary researchers representing four disciplines (history, archaeology, numismatics, and palynology); the goal for which was to make the project as interdisciplinary as possible to best appeal to the international community of scholars, rather than just archaeologists working in the region. An additional element of that plan, very nicely realized, is the publication of much of the project data online at www.mpov.uw.edu.pl.

The two volumes are divided up into four sections: “History, Theory, and Environment,” “Between the Oder and the Vistula,” “Case Studies,” and “Beyond the Oder and the Vistula.” Within those sections are twenty-six contributions and due to that wealth of material there is not enough space to review all of them, instead I will offer a syncretic overview of the high points of the volumes. One of the main high points is the wealth of material beyond the text. There are over 200 figures and more than sixty maps. The figures are of especially high quality and the press should be praised for its investment in them. The maps offer easy access to the material, in addition to simply locating the geography. For instance, Maps 4.2–4.7 illustrate palynological data and its effect on settlement change over time in a fashion that clearly elucidates what can be a dense and technical description in the text. This is not to criticize the authors, merely to note the different audiences that can be reached through multiple media. In fact, another of the highlights of the volumes is that the editors strove to create an interdisciplinary work, with an interdisciplinary audience in mind. Thus, they reached out to scholars who were not part of the project, and not always Polish, to add contextualization to the Migration Period in part 1 which helped to situate their studies in the wider scholarly world. Peter Heather is internationally the best known of these and his historical contextualization is incredibly useful; though he does note that the volume is “largely by and for archaeologists” (69).

The main focus of the project is in parts two and three, and there we see the nitty-gritty archaeological data that makes up the basis for the project as a whole. Alexandra Pesch discusses gold bracteates from the region but is also very clearly integrating the region between the Oder and the Vistula into a wider territory by noting that these bracteates can also be found in both Scandinavia and England. Judyta Rodzińska-Nowak engages with a subject that is difficult to include in settlement archaeology: nomads. The case studies of part three rely often on an emerging, if difficult to use, source base: metal detector finds by hobbyists. The finds by these hobbyists, especially when reported and turned over to museums, have radically shifted the history of this region in the Migration Period and provided more and broader evidence of interconnectivity; from Celtic materials to East Roman coins. The connections made with the hobbyist community by some of these authors have clearly paid dividends in finding materials that otherwise might be lost and recording them.

The contextualization from part one continues in part four, where the editors actively reach beyond their target region to discuss what is happening in the Migration Period elsewhere in western Eurasia. Andreas Rau notes not only the archaeological differentiation in southern Scandinavia, but also the difference in the historiography of the Migration Period in the studies of that area. Anna Bittner Wróblewska, specifically discussing the wide-ranging Olsztyn Group, sums up one of the main conclusions of the project as well by noting that even during the Migration Period, “what needs stressing is how stable and well-developed settlement remained in this region of Europe” (728). And if one does not have time to read the entire 879 pages of studies, Aleksander Bursche, Małgorzata Latałowa, and Magdalena Mączyńska have provided a wonderful summative outline of the work done at the end of the book where they quite accurately observe: “The results of the studies presented in this book have now improved our understanding of how settlement, culture and demographic change took place across space and over time in the territory of East-Central Europe” (863).

Although this review has glossed over an immense amount of information, it is worth highlighting the studies in this book as they attempt to do detailed archaeological, numismatic, and palynological research on a particular region, but situate it broadly in western Eurasian history and historiography to make it accessible to the widest range of scholars and increase the breadth of understanding about the Migration Period.