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.