Stone circles are a subject of interest that attracts a readership well beyond academia. The larger examples – especially Stonehenge, Avebury and Calanais – receive more than their fair share of the limelight, leaving the many hundreds of smaller examples in relative obscurity. This book is a welcome correction of this imbalance. It also serves as a useful companion to Colin Richards’s Building the Great Stone Circles of the North (Reference Richards2013), a recent review of northern Britain’s major stone circles in the light of recent excavations.

Bradley and Nimura’s edited book brings together the results of excavations on five small stone circles in Scotland, rounded off by overview chapters that place these recent discoveries in their chronological and social context. Bradley’s first chapter outlines the development of the project, designed to resolve problems concerning the relationship between henges and stone circles, the degree of variation between monuments of the same type and the extent of these monuments’ reuse into the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. All of these issues develop research questions resulting from his previously published research campaigns into Scottish Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age monument types, namely henges, Clava cairns and recumbent stone circles.

The next five chapters each document the excavation of a monument (Hillhead, Waulkmill, Croftmoraig, Hill of Tuach and Laikenbuie). Of these, Croftmoraig is a re-excavation following up Piggott and Simpson’s 1965 investigation; Bradley concludes that their sequence of a timber circle followed by a stone circle should be reversed, the timber structure being a Late Bronze Age roundhouse inserted inside the presumably Early Bronze Age stone circle. The last of these excavations, Laikenbuie (written up by Ronnie Scott and Annette Jack), is an Early Iron Age monument, in contrast to all the others, which have Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age beginnings.

The second half of the book, all written by Bradley, addresses the wider context. He outlines the chronology of stone circles: smaller ones in the early period around 3000 bc, the great circles during the mid-third millennium bc, and smaller ones again in the late third and second millennia bc. Just why stone circles and other monuments were smaller in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age – possibly linked to decentralised social formations introduced by Beaker users – is a major research question yet to be answered.

Subsequent chapters explore histories of reuse, variations between stone circles and an interpretive study of Croftmoraig’s complex sequence. Bradley explores how construction of stone circles, henges and cairns petered out in the late second and early first millennia bc as roundhouses and settlements became foci of ritual as well as domesticity. No longer were there two separate styles of architecture, one public and the other domestic. He also shows how astronomical orientation can be understood contextually in the later Bronze Age, by contrasting directions of southwest-facing stone circles (towards the darker side of the sky) with east-facing houses.

The study of stone circles in the last half-century has perhaps been overly concerned with questions of astronomical alignment at the expense of their chronology and context; this book, together with Richards’s similarly excellent volume, provides a more balanced appreciation of these monuments within their cultural setting. Bradley and Nimura’s book, in particular, reveals the changing forms and meanings of these monuments over thousands of years of British prehistory, illustrating how they were transformed and appropriated through the ages. It provides a useful warning about placing too much emphasis on surface evidence; without excavation, the diversity of forms and the complexity of their sequences go unrecognised.

This attractive and colourful volume is the latest output from Bradley’s string of investigations into Scottish megalithic monuments. It is yet another demonstration of his mastery in recovering often intractable evidence and in interpreting that evidence in his highly readable style. Perhaps unexpectedly, there is much of interest here for students of the Bronze Age and Iron Age – with analyses of cremation urns and inhumation burials – as well as for prehistorians interested in stone circles and monumentality.