OverviewUbisoft's Assassin's Creed series is one the entertainment industry's most popular titles set in the past. With a new game released on an annual basis—each full of distinct historical places, events, and people—the series has unfolded across post-classical history, from the Levant during the Third Crusade to Victorian-era London. The 2017 release of Assassin's Creed: Origins, which entailed a massive reconstruction of Hellenistic Egypt, pushed the series even further back in time. With it, Ubisoft also launched its Discovery Tour, allowing players to explore the game's setting at their leisure and without combat. These trends continued in 2018's Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, set in Greece during the Peloponnesian War. This review discusses the narrative, world, and gameplay of the latest Assassin's Creed within the series more broadly. We provide a critical appraisal of the experience that Odyssey offers and link it to this question: in the Assassin's Creed series, do we engage in meaningful play with the past, or are we simply assassinating our way through history?

This article presents the key results of a major survey carried out by the NEARCH project on the public perception of archaeology and heritage across Europe. The analysis focuses on three main points of significance for contemporary archaeological practice. The first is the image of archaeology and its definition in the perception of the general public. The second concerns the values that archaeology represents for the public. The third focuses on the social expectations placed on archaeologists and archaeology. The NEARCH survey clearly indicates that there is a significant public expectation by Europeans that archaeology should work comprehensively across a broad range of areas, and that cultural heritage management in general needs to engage more with different archaeological and heritage groups.Keywords: public archaeology, social engagement, European survey, NEARCH project Since the 2008 economic crisis, thinking about archaeology and the social sciences has changed. The repercussions of the market crisis have affected academic disciplines as well as the global economy (Schlanger & Aitchison, 2010). The primary impact on archaeological practice was the cessation of construction work, and underfunding of archaeological projects. In some countries (e.g. Spain and Ireland), commercial archaeology companies which depended on new investments were European Journal of Archaeology 21 (1) 2018, This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use. (Eogan, 2010;Parga-Dans, 2010). In other countries (such as Poland) the quality of archaeological work decreased (Marciniak & Pawleta, 2010). Today, archaeology and archaeologists find themselves in a new market reality. While the effective communication of the value of archaeology for understanding ourselves and our society has always been important, it has also been greatly magnified by the crisis. Therefore, the ideas championed by the public and community archaeology domains are even more critical within archaeological practice (see Merriman, 2004;Högberg, 2007; Madsuda & Okamura, 2011; Kajda et al., 2015;van den Dries, 2015). Other factors, such as institutional crises (Marciniak, 2015), denationalization of heritage policy and practice, the growing importance of multinational enterprises (Willems, 2014), greater emphasis on the human rights perspective on memory and identity (Hodder, 2010), or the relationship of heritage to well-being and quality of life (Abel et al., 2010) also have an increased influence on archaeological research. These multifaceted developments have been identified among practitioners in the field as a reflection of more general transformations with...

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The video game market is a big part of the current popular media landscape and is growing rapidly. Developers of video games are keen to make use of a variety of historical pasts as this provides them with recognisable themes, settings or narrative frameworks. Video games can be seen as the manifestation of experiential learning theory: they provide a unique informal learning How to cite this book chapter:

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As a video game enthusiast and archaeologist, the concept of archaeogaming has been on my radar since Andrew Reinhard coined the term back in 2013 (Reinhard 2013). This book is Reinhard's latest and most integral attempt at describing his idea of the many intersections of archaeology and play. This review will roughly follow the structure of the book and discuss contents by chapter, followed by a final assessment.