Primus Martin of Guinea Town, New York; Mary Boston Douglass of Nantucket; Josiah Eddy of Philadelphia; James Weeks of Brooklyn; William and Rebecca Davis of Timbuctoo, New Jersey; Isaac Holmes and Abiah Cowet Holmes of Cape Cod. The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast names and gives voice to these people of color and others in nine chapters on African America, two on Native America, and three on whiteness; in an introduction by the volume's coeditors; and in a concluding reflection by Charles Orser.

Matthews and McGovern propose “to examine the question of race as a vital factor in the way lives in the region were led, understood, and made meaningful” (p. 1). Most regional archaeological research, they argue, has embedded and hidden race within concepts such as ethnicity and culture. Within historical archaeology, race has been virtually synonymous with African Diaspora scholarship. Recently, archaeologists began applying critical race theory to studies of native peoples and selected European immigrant groups, as well as theorizing whiteness, the construct against which other races are opposed. This volume contributes to critical race studies, focusing on processes of racialization, the dynamism of racial group identities, and the deep entanglements among Native American, European American, and African American histories.

Following their introductory literature review and regional archaeological history focused on race, Matthews and McGovern order the chapters in three sections chronologically. Geographically, the chapters range from Philadelphia and Burlington County, New Jersey, in the south to Massachusetts in the north; more than half are set in the present-day state of New York.

Themes of identity, family, and community resistance to and negotiation of racism dominate the volume. In the section on African America, chapters by Cantwell and Wall and by Yamin and Ziesing reinterpret artifacts and features from the perspectives of hybridity and multivalence. The former chapter ponders whether a barrel and contents buried in a seventeenth-century New Amsterdam yard represent an act of material and symbolic bricolage in an early African ritual space. The latter paper is inspired by chamber pots decorated with eagle-like birds from privies in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The American eagle symbolized freedom—denied to African Americans—in the new Republic, and an eagle-like bird represented Sankofa, linking families back to their African heritage in an ingenious and subtle display of ambiguity. Barton and Orr challenge archaeologists’ preoccupation with identifying perceived Africanisms. In the context of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, between roughly 1860 and 1940, they complicate earlier interpretations by contrasting African American swept yards visually, economically, functionally, socially, and symbolically with middle-class white lawns.

Delle and Fellows, Lindner and Johnson, Bulger, and McQuinn examine community formation in response to racialization in New York state and on Nantucket. Delle and Fellows address the power of the racialized landscape. In the early 1800s, whites established farms with enslaved labor on appropriated native lands. By the mid-nineteenth century, industrial capitalism inspired progressive agriculturalists to replace African Americans with Irish tenants. The authors argue that by paying them less than their predecessors and installing them in former slave quarters, these agriculturalists succeeded in racializing the Irish. In the other communities that they explore, the authors elucidate African Americans’ strategic appropriation and subversion of genteel, white domestic symbols, materials, and social practices as tools of political resistance and activism.

In their essays about indigenous people of northeastern North America, McGovern and Handsman examine Long Island Montaukett and northern native communities that incorporated diverse peoples of color. They chart survivance practices “living and working in and against the ever-changing poses of modernity and capitalism,” as Handsman puts it (p. 248). The Cape Cod Mashpee, for example, tracked and defended ancestry and culture, excluding “coloured foreigner” community residents from corporate property ownership in order to preserve and conserve key resources for the tribe's uncertain future. The children of Mashpee and “coloured foreigner” marriages, however, were fully integrated into the tribe. The process ironically enabled and supported race-based ideologies of extinction and policies that dispossessed communities because of corporate ownership structures.

Other essays explore strategic memory and commemoration. Lewis exposes Deerfielders’ use of objects, spaces, and historical events to assert white identity and reclaim threatened cultural and economic authority in the late nineteenth century in western Massachusetts. Kruczek-Aaron documents alternative commemorative events that challenged racism in Timbuctoo, an Adirondack town whites deemed a failure. African Americans led by W. E. B. DuBois recast the narrative around abolitionism and in the context of a tourist economy that perpetuates inequality, subsequent generations created commemorative programming to promote social change. Geismar describes even more expansive, collaborative efforts to research, preserve, and commemorate the African American community of Weeksville, Brooklyn.

In the final section, Matthews, Lewis, and Gorsline define American whiteness as privilege based on an ideology of white social autonomy and, hence, freedom. To dismantle the racial consequences of this privilege, Gorsline asserts that the archaeology of whiteness must expose white injustices and must hold past and present perpetrators accountable. Reflecting on “the tyranny of silence and invisibility” (p. 313) that these authors combat, Orser concludes the volume, lauding their work for “destroy[ing] any vestige of racial righteousness that thoughtless boosters of the Northeast might still harbor” (p. 315). This volume appears at a most timely moment and contributes to the growing literature within historical archaeology that considers inequities and inequalities in our past while also promoting social justice.