The archaeology of prehistoric and early historic Iberia is gaining increasing international visibility due to a number of recent publications in English that provide up-to-date overviews on the fascinating evidence from one of the three main peninsulas of the Mediterranean (see e.g. M. Almagro-Gorbea, Iberia. Protohistory of the Far West of Europe (2014); M. C. Berrocal et al., The Prehistory of Iberia (2013); M. Dietler and C. López-Ruiz, Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia (2009); and K. Lillios, The Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula (2020)). This trend is continued by the volume under review, which focuses on the last centuries b.c. in the southern region traditionally known as Turdetania (roughly coinciding with present-day western Andalusia), thus complementing the recent monograph by S. Celestino and C. López-Ruiz (Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia, 2016) on the immediately preceding period.

Edited by Gonzalo Cruz Andreotti (University of Málaga), the present book is organised into eleven chapters that have a marked interdisciplinary character, combining contributions from archaeologists and ancient historians. The volume is mainly — although not exclusively — the result of a fruitful ongoing collaboration between researchers from the universities of Málaga and Seville. Despite the diversity of topics and approaches contained in the book, three underlying subjects can be distinguished throughout the work: a critical reanalysis of ancient written sources; a historiographical review of modern scholarship; and a renewed approach to ethnic identities. The book contains some high-quality figures, although they are rather unevenly distributed across the chapters. In-text references are presented as footnotes and there is a single bibliography at the end of the volume rather than individual lists of references by chapters.

The work begins with a preface in which the editor outlines the main scholarly trends in the study of ‘Romanisation’ in southern Iberia, as well as the content of the volume. The first three chapters discuss the classical writers that have shaped the image of Turdetania through the centuries. The first chapter by the editor analyses the ‘invention’ of Turdetania by Strabo (Book 3), the main ancient authority for the area, arguing that he presented an artificially homogenous picture of a region which was actually characterised by diversity. This is corroborated in the following chapter by Pierre Moret, centred on other authors such as Cato, Livy, Polybius and Appian who help to contextualise the information provided by Strabo. Ch. 3 by Encarnación Castro-Páez focuses on a more specific aspect, namely the idea of the city in Strabo's narrative and its association with the idea of civilisation in the case of Turdetania.

Halfway between ancient writers and archaeological evidence is the contribution by Francisco José García-Fernández, who deconstructs the traditional notion of a ‘Turdetanian’ culture. His chapter offers a good historiographical overview and combines it with recent theoretical approaches to ethnicity. The question of ethnicity also figures prominently in the following three papers, centred on the Phoenician-Punic elements found in southwest Iberia. Eduardo Ferrer Albelda distinguishes between ‘etic’ and ‘emic’ approaches, rightly emphasising the existence of different layers or ‘hierarchies’ of identities, and highlighting the importance of the civic component linked to cities. The Carthaginian presence is discussed by Ruth Pliego Vázquez on the basis of the numismatic evidence, which allows for the differentiation of two horizons, one predating 237 b.c. and the other related to the activities of the Barcid family culminating in the Second Punic War. Her interpretation is underlined by the following chapter by Manuel Álvarez Martí-Aguilar, who undertakes a reinterpretation of a famous passage by the Latin writer Justin. This adds to the increasing corpus of evidence confirming the growing Carthaginian influence in the region since the fourth century b.c.

Moving into the period after the Roman conquest, which took place at the turn between the third and second centuries b.c., Francisco Machuca Prieto addresses the changing identities of the ‘Western Phoenicians’, with particular emphasis on the use of symbols by local elites in order to adapt to the new political reality. The topic is further explored in the following chapter by Bartolomé Mora Serrano, who discusses ethnic and cultural identities between the third and first centuries b.c. on the basis of local coinage. Economic developments in the region are synthesised by Enrique García Vargas, in a paper that acknowledges the changes introduced by incoming Italian settlers. The closing chapter by the editor is explicitly designed as an epilogue, introducing some refreshing views on the process of incorporation of Turdetania into the Roman world that help to overcome previous assumptions.

Overall, the volume represents an excellent contribution to the study of the last centuries b.c. in southwest Iberia and, more broadly, a welcome addition to wider debates on ethnic and political identities in the ancient world. There are, however, some shortcomings. The discussion of the debates surrounding the concept of ‘Romanisation’ remains rather superficial in light of the extensive literature that the topic has generated at an international level since the 1990s (cf., for example, Gardner, Britannia 44 (2013), 1–25 and Woolf, Archaeological Dialogues 21 (2014), 45–50). Most chapters also tend to favour perspectives that we could classify as ‘top-down’, putting in the forefront information that relates to the views and lifestyles of elites (both local and foreign). This last point is not necessarily a criticism towards the authors included in the book, but rather a reflection of the available sources and the need for more work on the ‘archaeology of commoners’. In any case, these remarks should not detract from the undeniable value of the volume, which represents an important contribution to our knowledge of the transition between the Late Iron Age and the Roman period in the Western Mediterranean.