Most edited volumes rapidly disappear from view after publication and it is rare for such books to be more than the sum of their parts. Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa is not one such volume. Its editors have crafted a remarkably coherent work that has not a single weak or tangential chapter. The substantive foreword by Merrick Posnansky, to whom the book is dedicated, sets the tone, situating the volume within the history of West African archaeology and noting ‘how meaningless old time ascriptions’ (p. xii), such as the distinction between prehistory and history, appear in light of newer work.

The introductory chapter by the editors is the longest in the book, kicking off with the proposition that, ‘the commercial revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dramatically reshaped the regional contours of political organization across West Africa’ (p. 2). It is this ‘regional’ or, as the editors prefer, ‘landscape’ approach that characterizes this volume. J. Cameron Monroe and Akinwumi Ogundiran provide a good introduction to landscape archaeology and explain how landscapes are produced by social and cultural practices and how their study can inform us about past political economies. The focus on landscapes frees archaeological research from its prior obsession with ‘documentary “hot-spots”’ (p. 12), generally the trading towns and cities that were frequently visited by Europeans. The editors argue that the key theme of the volume is ‘variability’ which is engaged at three levels: (1) study of the impact of the intensity of contact on West African societies; (2) study of societies of varying sociopolitical scale, not just the large states that have been the focus of most research; and (3) exploration of current archaeological debates on the nature of political centralization in African societies (pp. 20–1). To this end, the ten case studies that comprise the core of the volume and range geographically from western Senegal to the plains south of Lake Chad are organized into three categories that the editors believe ‘capture the essence of the variation’ under study: these are ‘fragmented landscapes, state-generated landscapes, and internal frontier landscapes’ (p. 21).

Four chapters, by Ibrahima Thiaw (Upper Senegal), François Richard (Siin Kingdom), Samuel Spiers (Eguafo), and Neil Norman (Hueda), explore fragmented landscapes where attempts at political centralization were undone by factional or heterarchical forces. All of them focus on the countryside and do an excellent job of integrating documentary and oral historical sources with plenty of archaeological data. These chapters do more than simply place the historical narratives within a broader regional context; they show how historical processes shaped landscapes through changing settlement patterns and ‘cycling between control and autonomy’ (Richard, p. 98) in the governance of polities. In so doing, the agency of rural populations in adapting to the buffeting winds of the Atlantic era becomes manifest and indeed is sometimes given poignancy by the materiality of the settlements studied by the archaeologists.

State-generated landscapes are explored by Kevin MacDonald and Seydou Camara (Segou in Mali), Monroe (Dahomey), and Ogundiran (Oyo). Although united by their theme and by their high quality, these three contributions are very different from each other. The first, while aiming to understand ‘what the “slave mode of production” might look like in the archaeological record’ (p. 171) is more notable for presenting a substantive historical alternative to Roderick McIntosh's formulation of non-coercive, heterarchical states on the Middle Niger. While Monroe provides an account of the dynamic political economy of Dahomey, Ogundiran focuses upon an Oyo imperial colony, thereby advancing not only our understanding of the Oyo empire and theories of colonization, but also the archaeological methods for investigating this process.

Two of the three chapters on internal frontier landscapes, by Philip de Barros on the Bassar chiefdom and Christopher DeCorse on fortified towns in northern Sierra Leone, consider their evidence in the light of Igor Kopytoff's model of the Internal African Frontier, while that by Scott MacEachern on the Mandara political landscape ignores Kopytoff's work entirely, reflecting instead on the history of interpretation in this region and reaching the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that more archaeological research leads to more complicated historical reconstructions. Finally, to round out the volume, Ray Kea offers some historiographical reflections. Much of this chapter discusses ‘conceptual tools’ (p. 355), reframing the archaeology within the language of what we might be caricatured as ‘highfalutin’ theory, for example, ‘socio-natural regimes’ and ‘social ideologies of property’. More satisfying is his argument for the centrality of West Africa in world history and his recognition that archaeology ‘can serve as a point of reference for revisionist thinking among West African historians’ (p. 368).

In summary this is a praiseworthy volume of much more than parochial interest. It is also handsomely produced. Kudos to all! Let's hope a cheaper paperback edition will soon follow.