Throughout the twentieth century, considerable research has been dedicated to understanding the rise, development and end of ancient cities. In recent years, there has been a remarkable upsurge of new methodological and theoretical approaches applied in urbanism studies, which enables us to improve, validate or question our knowledge about ancient urban life. The three books reviewed here concern the development, transformation and experience of ancient Roman cities; leading experts in urban history and archaeology discussing the potential of new technologies and conceptual frameworks for analysing Roman urban space.

We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al. 2024; O'Brien et al. 2024).

This edited volume by Mark Hauser and Julia Jong Haines aims to bring together local narratives within the context of the Indian Ocean in modern times, from c. AD 1500, and establish how these narratives can inform historical archaeology. As the editors highlight in the introductory chapter, historical archaeology has been greatly informed and inspired by the Atlantic world and its colonial histories. Here, they seek instead to foreground the Indian Ocean as a setting for historical archaeology in its own right. The authors use the long and deep history of interconnectedness and trade in this ocean as a basis for understanding more recent history, not just in light of colonial impact but through bottom-up approaches that focus on the local in the global. The case studies in this book and its overall theme are also part of the ongoing process to decentralise Europe in archaeological discourse. The book consists of 11 chapters, including an introductory chapter by Haines and Hauser and two commentaries. The majority of the case studies are from island East Africa or South India, which naturally limits the scope somewhat.

Egyptology has been changing. At least in the way its practitioners present their findings to a broad public audience. A selection of recent publications for general-interest readership represents something of a reorientation of perspectives on the (Western-led) archaeological ‘discovery’ of Pharaonic Egyptian remains, and the opening up of a subtle counter-narrative, which is something of an anti-archaeology. Rather than attempting to reconstruct what might positively be said of ancient events, their causes and motivations, Egyptologists are increasingly owning up to what is not known or what happened in the aftermath of the ‘main event’ that conditions the nature of the evidence we have at our disposal.