Reading these two books is like peering into a magnifying lens. One is able to focus in and reflect on small details, but is also made aware that these details are inextricably linked to, and informed by, other elements in the field of view. In Material relations: the marriage figurines of Prehispanic Honduras and Maya figurines: intersections between state and household, the authors carry out focused analyses of ceramic figurines from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Through the theoretical lenses of materiality, practice and mimesis, they show how figurines, as individual objects or assemblages, created social life through their portability, transferability and biographies. Furthermore, because of their association with households, they show how figurines can speak to the lives of women, children and commoners, the dynamics of households, and the relationship between non-states or culturally peripheral areas and the state. These two books stand as nuanced exemplars of microscale approaches in archaeology and a concern with intimate practices to reveal larger social phenomena.

In contrast to the well-known Palaeolithic archaeology of Iberia and its contribution to scholarly debates on the earliest Europeans, the later prehistory (c. 5600–400 BC) of the peninsula remains a relatively unknown subject for the wider world. The three recent volumes under review therefore provide the opportunity to outline current trends in research on the first farmers at the westernmost end of Europe and to assess what these contribute to wider understanding of the past. A common thread among the three volumes is that they are predominantly authored by local (Spanish and Portuguese) scholars but aimed at an international readership, addressing questions of global interest. They tackle essentially Iberian research issues, but some of these (e.g. monumental ditched enclosures, the emergence of unequal socio-political structures) are to be understood as pan-European phenomena.

These words, published in the pages of Antiquity more than 20 years ago, belie the dark depths into which Albanian archaeologists were plunged with the transition to democracy during 1991–1992. Despite the long bread queues that characterised Albanian life before the Iron Curtain fell, Albanian archaeologists engaged in missions across the country—nearly 50 in 1988. The charmed life of Albania's archaeologists until 1991 is easily explained. Between 1944 and 1985, the dictator Enver Hoxha invested in archaeology to secure an Illyrian myth for an unstable republic, which, in 1913, was carved out of the western Ottoman Empire. The first generation of communist archaeologists was trained in the Soviet Union; they in turn mentored subsequent generations. As a result, with the advent of democracy, almost no archaeologist had first-hand experience of Western European or American archaeology. The few who had engaged with Western Europe (Neritan Ceka, Aleksander Meksi, Genc Pollo) changed careers and entered politics (Hodges 2014). After the first elections, the 1990s, bearing the bitter scars of communism, were exceedingly confusing and practically complicated for Albania's archaeologists. And yet the Institute of Archaeology has tenaciously held its place in Albanian society, and, under the leadership of the adroit Muzafer Korkuti (Hodges & Bejko 2006), and now Luan Përzhita, there has been a steadying direction that can be readily detected in this encyclopaedic volume arising from a conference held during the centenary celebrations of the Republic of Albania.

Grand theories of human social organisation have sometimes struggled to find a place for the Inka empire, which achieved an unprecedented degree of state power across the Andean region of western South America for a few generations in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries AD. This is in part because the Inka realm looked so different from the ancient empires of Eurasia. The axis of Inka power ran north–south through some of the most diverse and difficult terrain on the planet, and Inka material culture and institutions lacked many of the Western hallmarks of civilisation. In Ancient society (1877), Lewis Henry Morgan relegated the Inkas to a status of ‘middle barbarism’ for possessing only Bronze Age metallurgy, placing a realm of perhaps 10 million inhabitants in the company of the Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest and the society that built Stonehenge. More than a century later, the sociologist Michael Mann (1986) offered the Inkas as an exception to his general model for wielding so much power without using writing, currency or low-cost forms of transportation.

The titles of these weighty tomes invite questions: the palace of whom? The kings of where? A palace when? Olivier Poisson, concluding the first volume, writes of the restoration programme of 1943–1960 that “le palais est resté, malgré le pari des restaurateurs de la décennie 1950, le souvenir un peu vide et abstrait d’une ‘monarchie oubliée et éphemère’” (p. 539). This ‘forgotten and ephemeral monarchy’ of Majorca, a scion of the kings of Aragon, ruled from 1270–1344. In 1276, the monarchy had made Perpignan the capital of the Kingdom of Majorca and began work on the ‘Palais des Rois de Majorque’. To posterity's good fortune, the final Majorcan monarch, James III (‘the Unfortunate’), left the ‘Lois palatines’ (Palatine Laws) of 1337 that provide key insights into the etiquette and even the significance of colour in the early fourteenth-century palace. Following the dispossession of James III in 1344, Perpignan came into the hands of the Aragonese monarchy until 1462. The Palace then passed into French ownership and was used as a barracks for three decades in the late fifteenth century. Following return to Spanish ownership in 1493, Emperor Charles V, Philip II and their successors made further modifications. The Palace finally came back into French hands in 1659 and was henceforth a barracks, graced by significant extension of the fortifications by Vauban. Under French military control, benign neglect preserved early architectural phases, a signal advantage for those subsequently involved in the restoration of the Palace. Following the fall of France in 1942 (and with Spain in fascist hands), the buildings were largely released from military use and handed to the local authorities of the Pyrénées Orientales. A programme of repair and restoration was established, and brought to fruition by the local socialist mayor, a former member of the Resistance, towards the end of the 1940s. The restored buildings were opened to the public in 1958.