Alfredo González-Ruibal has written a remarkable book that, in keeping with the title, defies and indeed resists easy classification. It does not attempt to build a fresh archaeological theory of, or a novel approach to grasp, ‘resistance’ in and on archaeological terms, while the exploration of the limits of state power would surely justify the shelving of this book alongside studies of state formation. Even if this volume is mostly concerned with the past, albeit that of recent decades and centuries, the investigations reported on these pages mostly involve living people and draw on accounts by contemporary informants and detailed observations of their present-day material life-worlds. From this perspective, González-Ruibal's book may be seen as not so much indebted to historical archaeology, understood as the archaeological investigation of the recent past, as aligned with social anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. The latter label is nevertheless emphatically rejected by the author who insists that ‘archaeology’ is the correct tag for his work, even if he finds little relevance in the more conventional archaeological literature on resistance (pp. 6–12). It is surely no coincidence that the archaeological study that González-Ruibal makes most of is Matthew Liebmann's (Reference Liebmann2012) investigation of the seventeenth-century Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, which shares many features with the book under discussion. On balance, ‘material culture study’ is perhaps the best classification of this remarkable book, if only because it is as ‘undisciplined’ as that field has been claimed to be (Miller & Tilley Reference Miller and Tilley1996).

Materiality is what this book is about, and it serves as the lens through which to achieve a deeper understanding—and not just a thicker description—of the multiplicity and complexity of resistance and state power. Drawing much of his intellectual inspiration from Pierre Clastre's writings about the limits of state power, González-Ruibal concentrates his investigations on those situations that have largely remained beyond the reach of state power, and where more or less egalitarian communities have found shelter to hold out ‘against the state’ in Clastre's words. This has led him to focus on the ‘borderlands’, where the expansionary drive of ancient and modern states has ground to a halt and where a range of communities have sought shelter from state domination and exploitation. While González-Ruibal may not be the first to investigate the limits of the state and to explore resistance, his approach differs from most postcolonial work by the explicit and insistent emphasis on the violence involved in both state expansion and subaltern resistance. This is perhaps most evident in his discussion (Chapter 2) of the borderlands as the ‘shatter zone’ of state formation and expansion—a material metaphor borrowed from James Scott that takes on a new dimension in González-Ruibal's hands.

In concrete geographical and historical terms, González-Ruibal's study concerns western Ethiopia, where the highland plateaus that have long been home to state societies give way to the Sudanese lowlands further east, where states and kingdoms have long held sway. The rugged borderlands that lie between these are dramatically marked out by a steep escarpment, below which rocky outcrops and thick forests make for a landscape eminently suited to escape surveillance. It is in this area that the three ethnic groups of the Gumuz, Bertha and Mao live, each the focus of one of three long chapters that together make up more than two-thirds of the book. In these chapters, González-Ruibal discusses in great detail topics such as settlement patterns, land use, domestic housing and organisation, productive technologies (of pottery in particular), and dress and adornment. These are of course eminently archaeological topics and, while the bulk of information has been collected ethnographically, the frequent interjection of archaeological and historical information gives the discussions time-depth and enhances their archaeological nature. The parallel organisation of these chapters ensures a high degree of comparability, which is cemented by recurrent cross-references; an additional result is that these chapters and indeed the book as a whole cohere very well, despite the often very detailed discussions of objects and contexts. Given these rich accounts and the emphasis on materiality, it is a shame that the book offers few and poorly drawn maps and that the material culture has not been illustrated more abundantly, especially as the photographs and drawings of objects, places and contexts that are included do much to enliven the descriptions.

Overall, however, this is an outstanding book that not only offers a rich, diachronic account of a region that is not well studied at all, but that most of all makes an original contribution to debates of resistance and state formation; it also vividly underscores the rich potential of archaeological material culture studies.