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.

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 February issue of Antiquity heralds some significant changes: a new publisher, increased frequency of publication and developments to our website. NBC will continue as a regular feature, aiming to cover more or less the same number of books across six, rather than four, issues. That said, in this current issue, NBC adopts a slightly different form, one devoted not to the usual melange of new titles, but to a single—if massive—publication.