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In his latest book, PeterMitchell invites interdisciplinary and cross-regional studies of the eponymous post-1492 ‘horse nations’. Assembling diverse archaeological, ethnographic and material culture studies of the horse in the Americas, South Africa and Australasia from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, he impressively surveys more than 40 indigenous societies. Revisiting a debate in American anthropologyoverwhether cultural change should be attributed to the horse (Roe 1955; Wissler 1912) or developments already ongoing within recipient cultures (Palermo 1986), Mitchell incorporates critical post-colonial methodologies emphasizing non-homogenous cultures, dynamic processes of ethnogenesis, and contact as a set of mutually entangling processes, and asks: did the horse, in fact, impact culture formation where it was newly introduced, and more importantly, how? Mitchell proposes that archaeology, with its focus on material culture, uniquely enables this measure and allows for more ambitious inter-continental comparisons. In brief, the adoption of horses, for Mitchell, indeed constituted ‘an extraordinary event’ whose cultural consequences can be assessed according to his proposed four-part typology. The horse, in this sense, serves as a proxy for not only the effects of colonization, but also the indigenous and animal agency that shaped the direction of these developments. After an overview of the chapter organization, this review will focus on Mitchell’s ambitions for large-scale comparisons of the ‘horse nations’ with pastoralismnomadism constructs, and new insights from the material culture of the horse into indigenous relational ontologies. Horse Nations begins with a summary of the evolution of the modern horse species, Equus caballus, closely following the cladistics systematics modelled by McFadden (1979) to sketch the re-currentmigration of ‘caballine’ horses from the Americas to Eurasia and Africa, 1.2 million to 8000 years ago. It then delves into themost recent work on extinction events and domestication in the Eurasian steppe in the fourth millennium BC (Anthony 2007; Bendrey 2012), before leaping ahead to the post-1492 moment. The bulk of the book is organized according to nine ecological regions, primarily in the North and South American continents (Southern Plains; Northern Prairie; Great Basin; Columbian Plateau; California; Amazonia; Gran Chaco and Mato Grosso; Patagonia and Pampas) and one chapter devoted to outback Australia and mid-elevation mountain ranges in South Africa. In laying out this structure for his comparative project, Mitchell calls attention to the unfortunate discontinuities between palaeontological studies of equine evolution and archaeological studies of equine domestication, between prehistoric archaeology and ethnohistorical anthropology in the Americas, and between North and South American archaeology, that could otherwise be gainfully and complementarily employed. Mitchell’s book emphasizes that the changes wrought by adoption of the horse resulted from internal culture dynamics and the agency of choice. Rather than pursuing a unifying argument from ecological parameters, Mitchell demonstrates that within each of these regions some culture groups adopted the horse, some used it peripherally and others did not adopt it at all. To add order to this diversity, Mitchell offers a differential typology under the umbrella term horse nations. He delineates, first, those huntergatherer or mobile groups that became equestrian nomads, largely for big-game hunting in the Prairie and Gran Chaco regions; second, semi-mobile pastoralists, using horses as accessories to other economic pursuits like herding, including the Navajo, Comanche and Australian aborigine; third, raiders and traders interested in the horse as an object for consumption, including the Great Basin Utes and South AfricanKhoe; and fourth, sedentary and hierarchical groups that adopted horses for less obvious economicmotives,most strikingly the Araucanians in the Southern Cone. Extending Pekka Hämäläinen’s (2013) description of the ‘kinetic empire’, Mitchell emphasizes that increased mobility had the greatest impact in horse nations, given enough time and space for distinct cultural transformation. In this respect, Mitchell’s typology pairs neatly with one offered in Kradin, Bondarenko and Barfield’s Nomadic Pathways (2003), which views nomadism in gradations of movement and social stratification, distinguishing nomadic, semi-nomadic, semi-sedentary and sedentary forms. In fact, Mitchell precisely aims to provoke a crossregional examination of nomadic culture that incorporates post-1492 horse nations, without cordoning off ‘equestrian nomads’ (as hunter-gatherers) from pastoralist nomads. Mitchell gives credit to the important effects of ethnogenesis as a factor in the creation of horse nations, such as the dispersed Khoe in South Africa or the Arauco in Chile, and also the crucial vector of the mixed ethnicity Comanchero or Korana raiders. Mitchell also marks the end point of the horse nation with the onset of modern technology of war, communications, transportation and CAJ 29:2, 365–366 © 2018 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research