This book, which is mostly the product of a 2015 conference held at Brown University, ‘Antiquarianism across the Atlantic’, is an important contribution to recent scholarship on antiquarianism, and the history of archaeology more generally. It is an interesting companion to World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Schnapp et al., Reference Schnapp, von Falkenhausen, Miller and Murray2013), which shares a number of contributors and a similar concern with definitions that we find in the volume under review. Perhaps most telling is the common ancestry of both books—the foundational work of Arnoldo Momigliano (Reference Momigliano1950; Reference Momigliano1990) exploring the genesis of European history-writing, Alain Schnapp's highly influential (but partial) history of archaeology, The Discovery of the Past (Reference Schnapp1996), and Bruce Trigger's foundational A History of Archaeological Thought (Reference Trigger1989; Reference Trigger2006).

Antiquarianisms is focused on two regions that have much to contribute to the exploration of the nature and role of antiquarian thinking—the Spanish colonies in the Americas, and the provinces of the Ottoman Empire (particularly those bordering the Mediterranean). The book is sensibly organised into three, really four parts: I: ‘Comparison and Its Limits’; II: ‘Contact in the Americas’, and III: ‘Contact in Ottoman Lands’. The final two essays, ‘Forgetting Athens’ (Ch. 9, by Benjamin Anderson), and ‘Coda: Not for Lumpers Only’ (Ch.10, by Peter Miller), are really what I would collect as Part IV: ‘A Return to Definitions and Comparisons’, given their focus on seeking answers to some of the important questions asked in the Introduction by Benjamin Anderson and Felipe Rojas, and the discussions by Felipe Rojas and Alfredo González-Ruibal in Part I (Ch. 2, ‘Archaeophilia: A Diagnosis and Ancient Case Studies’, and Ch. 3, ‘The Virtues of Oblivion: Africa and the People without Antiquarianism’, respectively).

However, it is also fair to say that these questions propel the majority of the essays in the volume, most memorably in Eva-Maria Troelenberg's insightful discussion of archaeological research in Wilhelmine Germany in Chapter 8 (‘“…That We Trusted Not to Arab Notions of Archaeology”: Reading the Grand Narrative against the Grain’). In this context a concern with definition and comparability is not the prerogative of the pedant. The ambiguity of antiquarianism in all of its many guises is precisely the point here. Again, although the focus is on ‘transatlantic’ discussions, the influence of long-standing discussions of antiquarianism in China and India is plain to see (e.g. Mantena, Reference Mantena2012; von Falkenhausen, Reference von Falkenhausen, Schnapp, von Falkenhausen, Miller and Murray2012; Wu Hung, Reference Wu Hung2010).

The exploration of Spanish antiquarianism in the Americas has been a rich source of data and perspectives about the many ‘entanglements’ between indigenous and settler societies and cultures. However, Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Chapter 8) and Benjamin Anderson in Chapter 9 (‘Forgetting Athens’) provide examples of somewhat longer standing in the Mediterranean with the engagement of West with East, which radically changed its shape over the centuries following the end of the Crusades. Indeed the history of antiquarianism in both contexts makes two points crystal clear.

First, antiquarianism has a history. Its tenets (and the objects of its interests) change over time and are deeply contextual. For example, the antiquarianism of Canon Greenwell in the nineteenth century is very different to that of William Camden in the sixteenth. Second, that antiquarianism at any time was diverse in the interests and approaches of its practitioners. There were many sources of antiquarian diversity—the types of information being collected and interpreted ranged from written documents, to coins, inscriptions, landscapes, architecture, monuments, folklore, and material culture. While some antiquarians ranged across this totality, many confined themselves to a specific class of evidence, developing methods of analysis that were to underwrite the disciplines of history, ethnology, and archaeology, that would subsequently develop these specializations still further.

Social and cultural contexts of antiquarian practice (wherever it was undertaken) were also a major source of diversity. In this sense it is surely wrong to speak of antiquarianism in its European homeland as being singular or unchanging. From the sixteenth century onwards, Europeans experienced significant social and cultural change though not necessarily from the same sources or with the same outcomes. This diversity in approach and purpose was further enhanced through contact with the wider non-European world (in the case of the present volume with the Americas and with the Ottoman Empire), but also through the colonisation of Africa, Asia, and Australasia. Antiquarianism consequently grew from the realm of the local, to the national and the global. Although the context of these colonial or imperial antiquarianisms (practiced outside Europe) shared many elements in common with the founding European forms, they also became increasingly differentiated as antiquarians (both European and non-European) responded to local histories and traditions of inquiry.

The studies presented in Antiquarianisms underscore these points but add a little more to the approach developed in World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Schnapp et al. Reference Schnapp, von Falkenhausen, Miller and Murray2013). What is added is a sense of dynamism within these two different but similar antiquarian traditions, thereby moving the whole field of study forward by acknowledging the dynamism of antiquarianism itself, and moving away from an obsession with definitions, and with versions of ‘what Momigliano said or did’. Thus antiquarianism is now to be conceived of as more than its European history or indeed the history of European thought on ‘the other’.

But Antiquarianisms only partially succeeds in animating this sense of possibility with occasional breakout comments from Rojas in his elegant essay ‘Archaeophilia’ (Chapter 2) such as:

What dulls the message here is a strange resistance found throughout the volume, with the exception of the essay by Troelenberg (Chapter 8), to engaging with scholarship that has already made these points, primarily because it is drawn from contexts that lie far outside the traditional antiquarian happy hunting grounds of Europe, China, India, and Latin America. Schnapp's edited volume, made up as it might be by snapshots of diversity, engaged these core issues in greater depth, and from very different contexts, than we find here (see the essays by Murray (Reference Murray, Schnapp, von Falkenhausen, Miller and Murray2013) and Kuchler (Reference Kuchler, Schnapp, von Falkenhausen, Miller and Murray2013)), and with a clearer understanding of the implications of this for contemporary societies.

Thus, our understanding of antiquarianism has been transformed in ways that allow archaeologists, anthropologists, and indeed antiquarians to see and to begin to comprehend that antiquarianism is a living thing, and that it is not just confined to the cultivated tastes of Chinese or European scholars of the last 400 years. This enables historians of archaeology to see that it took a very long time indeed for prehistoric archaeologists (especially those working in the settler societies of North America and Australasia) to understand that their work might have significance for indigenous peoples that could go far beyond the need to narrate the history of humanity from earliest times.

Nonetheless, a demonstration of the historical dynamism within two discrete locales of antiquarian endeavour is very welcome, particularly as it underscores an important truth: that antiquarianism can provide a more conducive space to explore, in concert with people who are not specialists, the diverse connections between past and present. The liberation of antiquarianism from the confines of outmoded definitions is a liberation of our power to make history and to change its practice.