This is primarily a book about a row of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age houses in South Uist—a row of houses that happened to contain the first solid and scientific evidence for the intentional mummification and curation of human bodies in prehistoric Britain. Analyses of the human remains are previously published by members of the excavation team, and while many readers will be eager to learn more of these highly important findings, this volume is primarily concerned with the equally exciting and detailed story of the 12 excavated houses, which spanned a period of c. 500 years in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. The report delivers the site narrative via the stratigraphy, structural remains and chronology. The contexts of key artefacts, artefact groups and ecofacts are dealt with comprehensively, and only one artefact category is given full coverage: the ceramics.

The work is the latest volume in the wonderfully productive and innovative field collaboration pioneered by Sheffield and Cardiff Universities’ archaeology departments during the 1990s and 2000s, known as SEARCH. That research programme has previously given us many seminal reports of brochs, wheelhouses, and Pictish and Viking settlements. Motivation for excavating Cladh Hallan included mitigating ongoing destruction due to sand quarrying and wind erosion. The initial research aims were framed by the desire to peer into the later second to early first millennia BC, a period not well represented in Western Isles archaeology. The excavators wished to interrogate the chronological trajectory of settlement in the region, which appears to follow a trend from small, nucleated village settlement forms in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age to dispersed settlement in the Middle Iron Age.

The nine seasons of excavation at Cladh Hallan yielded a wealth of evidence and exponentially exceeded expectations. In phases 1 and 2, the earliest traces of human activity on site were represented by a thin, buried plough soil associated with ard-mark cultivation dating to around 2000 BC, along with the scant remains of Early Bronze Age settlement that was largely represented by artefact scatters (Chapter 2). These were sealed by a thick deposit of windblown sand, indicating a hiatus before the establishment, in phase 3, of a series of somewhat formal cremation burials in a period running into the Middle Bronze Age (Chapter 2). Inhumations were taking place by c. 1200 BC, including one of the principal mummified individuals, a woman. Subsequently (phases 4–7), the first recognisable houses were established on the southern fringe of the main trench.

Phase 8 saw the construction of the most substantial and long-lived settlement elements on site, the row of conjoined roundhouses that was orientated N–S across the main trench. Within these houses—placed as foundation deposits in pits—were several mummified bodies, including the reinterred remains of the woman from the initial set of inhumations. Her body was a composite, given a replacement skull of a man. The foundation of each of the three main roundhouses of the row was marked by their own inhumation deposit. From phases 8–15 (Chapters 4–11), the story of long-term development concentrates on the construction and transformation of the main row of houses. During the Late Bronze Age, the tri-modular and then bi-modular form of the roundhouse row was followed by a single large house in the Early Iron Age. The sequence evokes a significant trajectory for Scottish Atlantic settlement, which has seldom been seen so clearly, and on a single site, as it is at Cladh Hallan. A final break with tradition occurred in the sixth or fifth century BC, when a double house was established in the northern area of the main trench (phase 16).

In excavating the site, sandy soils and complex stratigraphy were ever present, both of which can be highly rewarding but technically difficult to excavate and understand. Skilful and patient fieldwork techniques also extended to the sampling strategy, with 100 per cent recovery of all occupation deposits and floors. This reaped a massive harvest of artefactual and environmental materials, representing both everyday detritus and more episodic structured deposition, which mark cycles of refurbishment. Differential culinary and material practices were recognisable across the contemporaneous houses, especially between the central and southern houses of the Bronze Age row, indicating differences in the character of households. Patterns of material are discussed in terms of the conceptual framework of house cosmologies, especially the sun-wise model of house use and activity, which has been a long-standing concern of several of the authors. The findings further substantiate the cosmological underpinning of the architectural order. In general, the report wears its theory lightly. Lucid writing and communication of the highly complex site stand out throughout the publication.

Subsequent specialist sections (Chapters 13–15) add extensive details to the story via soil micromorphology, the dating programme and the detailed ceramics catalogue. The latter gives a strong sense of the material richness to be fully addressed in Part 2. An important outcome of the dating is the production of a tightly modelled chronology, which elucidates the swift tempo of house renewal and formal deposits that accompanied re-organisations. These included evidence for metalworking, including hundreds of important Bronze Age fired clay mould fragments. The authors suggest that the bouts of metalworking were intimately tied to the cycle of major building and re-building. This rings especially true and will be an important phenomenon to look for during on-going and future excavations of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement in Atlantic Scotland and beyond.

Cladh Hallan Part 2 is eagerly anticipated, and the extremely rich assemblage of artefacts and environmental material will bring further life to the story of this long-lived place in the Hebridean Machair. Much more than a primer or scene-setter for the human remains, Part 1 is a great asset and a superb volume supported by high production values and lavish illustrations. The book evokes 500 years of settlement development and forms a contextualised basis for understanding the dynamic interplay between the dead and the living. The report thus makes a highly important contribution to our understanding of Scottish and British later prehistory.