Dispossession—the action of taking away and depriving people of their homeland, property, history, language, identity, cultural practices and/or livelihoods—underlies and connects these two publications. Dispossession is a long-standing interest in historical archaeology dating to the 1970s when its study was referred to as the ‘archaeology of the disenfranchised’. Both books contribute superb additions to this established research area, and more significantly, they introduce new themes, approaches and insights into the myriad ways that communities were dispossessed in the distant and recent past, as well as in the present.

It is grimly appropriate that two such important studies of the ancient town of Dura-Europos have been published so recently. While the deliberate destruction of heritage undertaken at Palmyra by Daesh received widespread press coverage in 2015, the destruction at Dura, caused by systematic looting of the town and its necropolis, is less well known. The site lies in the Deir es-Zor province, near the Iraqi border, and one of the areas of Syria under firm Daesh control for the longest time. Satellite images of the densely cratered site are dramatic and distressing.

These two volumes present the results of fieldwork conducted by Tertia Barnett from 2004–2009 in the Wādi al-Ajāl (Libya). The first volume provides a general synthesis in three sections: 1) presentation of Saharan rock art in general; history of discoveries and research; climate, environment and human activities in the Holocene Sahara; state of knowledge on the chronology. 2) Presentation of the method adopted for collecting data; results of the surveys; subjects and themes observed. 3) Analysis of the location of the engravings; study of their relationship with the ‘cultural landscape’; concluding remarks. Two appendices are devoted to pre-pastoral and pastoral sites, and to the 3D modelling of several engraved panels respectively. The second volume makes available the totality of the observed data, describing each panel individually. For each one, the inventory indicates its number and geographic position, then gives a detailed description, specifies its orientation, its location in the valley and its degree of inclination, before indicating the stylistic affiliation of the engravings observed. The two books are enhanced by a large number of photographs, surveys and maps, in a very careful presentation and a pleasant layout.

At first sight, these two volumes represent different views of the task of interpreting material culture: the first seems to announce a post-processual paradigm, emphasising the agency of objects and the ambivalence of meanings in the area of magical practice, whereas the second makes no overt claims about materiality while based firmly on museum objects. In fact, however, the differences between them are rather smaller than first impressions suggest.