Magdalena de Cao: An Early Colonial Town on the North Coast of Peru. JEFFREY QUILTER, editor. 2020. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Vol. 87. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. xx + 457 pp., 181 color figures. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87365-216-2

From 2004 to 2012, Quilter and his team undertook multiple seasons of excavation of the colonial church and town; the current volume provides an overview of this work, funded by the NEH, NSF, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Peabody Museum, with considerable in-kind support from the Wiese Foundation. All the main categories of material culture are given chapter-length treatment by an expert, including beads, both Indigenous and imported (by Alexander Menaker); imported ceramics, largely Panamanian (by Parker VanValkenburgh); Indigenous pottery (by Jennifer Ringberg); metal objects including pins, candle cutters, tweezers, and bells (by Andrew Z. Lorey and Jeffrey Quilter); and two silver coins from seventeenth-century Potosí (by Richard Burger). [...]the twelve fragments of seventeenth-century playing cards recovered, along with other early colonial Spanish playing cards excavated at Huaca Tres Palos in the 1970s, are well illustrated, with a thorough discussion of types and styles.