Beads and beer

Gijanto, Liza. The life of trade: events and happenings in the Niumi's Atlantic Center. 2016. x+234 pages, 26 b&w illustrations, 24 tables. Abingdon & New York: Routledge; 978-1-138-10115-9 hardback £85.

Linaa, Jette. Urban consumption: tracing urbanity in the archaeological record of Aarhus c. AD 800–1800 (Jysk Arkæologisk Selskabs Skrifter 94). 2016. 239 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Moesgaard: Jutland Archaeological Society; 978-87-93423-06-0 hardback DKK 275.

During the late medieval period, the trade networks of Senegambia in West Africa looked to the continent's interior — north across the Sahara and east through the Sahel. The arrival of European traders, starting with the Portuguese and later the French, British and others, reoriented the region's political and economic focus to the Atlantic. In The life of trade: events and happenings in the Niumi's Atlantic Center, Liza Gijanto documents the rise and decline of the regional trading centre of Niumi, at the mouth of the Gambia River, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Drawing on documentary and archaeological evidence, she explores the day-to-day experiences of the region's diverse inhabitants, including indentured slaves and British merchants. In particular, her analysis builds on the evidence, preserved in rubbish deposits, for the consumption of food and artefacts in order to assess the “internalization of the Atlantic experience in the Niumi commercial center” (p. 22). Gijanto's theoretical framework emphasises a multi-scalar concept of time, starting with Braudel (as do some of the other books reviewed below) and Bourdieu's social habitus (ditto) in order to connect long-term, macro-scale processes with everyday lived experiences.

Chapter 2 provides the broader context for the rise of Niumi. Gijanto starts with the centuries prior to significant European involvement. She emphasises the nature of local Mande society and, especially, the social mechanisms for hospitality towards foreign traders or ‘strangers’ such as African juulas (including Muslim clerical-commercial traders who controlled caravan routes) and Luso-Africans (the descendants of early Portuguese traders and Mandinka women). These social institutions were vital to the subsequent ability of European traders to establish themselves and to draw Niumi into the capitalist Atlantic world. She also outlines the faltering but eventually successful attempts of the British to establish commercial control, including the founding of a military base on the tiny James Island in the Gambia River. Strategically, this choice of location was brilliant, although it was tactically flawed owing to its complete dependence on external supply. The village of Juffure was the main regional settlement on the north bank of the river, “a multi-ethnic community comprised of Mandinka, Luso-Africans, Muslims, and other local African groups” (p. 45); it was also the focus of increasing British attention through the foundation of a trading factory and a supply base for the garrison at James Island. In addition, the British also drew supplies from the Luso-African settlement of San Domingo. The latter was primarily occupied by ‘castle slaves’, owned by trading companies and used for various agricultural and commercial activities.

Pre-European trade focused on salt and iron, but as Niumi entered the Atlantic world, attention shifted to goods such as tobacco, firearms, metalwares and beads. Gijanto pays particular attention to the way in which imported (white) tobacco pipes were quickly replaced by pipes made of local (red) clays, and to beads of varied size, shape and, especially, colour. Comparison of archaeological assemblages with the logs of goods imported by the Royal African Company reveals discrepancies. For example, the logs record that red beads were the most commonly imported, but white beads were more abundant at Juffure. This is taken to indicate that imports were selectively consumed under the influence of pre-existing norms and values.

Chapter 5 turns to ‘Food and social display’. Rubbish deposits are analysed for evidence of ‘episodic deposits’, or feasts, set against a broader background of everyday meals. Food included domesticated grains (e.g. millet and sorghum, although few New World plants) and both wild and domesticated animals (including pig, presumably consumed by the Christian population). A key point here is that feasts were not characterised by the diversity of foodstuffs, but rather by the quantities in which they were consumed—indeed “the lack of diversity was a feature of the elite diet” (p. 183), demonstrating wealth and status through exclusive reliance on domesticates. Nonetheless, the presence of wild animals or small domesticates (e.g. chicken) points towards the incorporation of the wider community. Analysis of the archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological assemblages from the Juffure factory demonstrates the eating habits of the colonial inhabitants, partly maintaining British tastes and partly reflecting local foods and preparation techniques. A wider comparison of the evidence from the elite Juffure village and from the slave settlement at San Domingo shows surprisingly little distinction in terms of food types, as well as objects such as beads and tobacco pipes; Gijanto sees this as “the castle slaves mimicking the ‘upperclass’ despite their own marginal status” (p. 190). She concludes that: “Placing Juffure at the center of this analysis restores African agency in international commerce and provides a unique view of the interactions fostered by Atlantic trade” (p. 209).

This is not a part of the world with which I am very familiar, and the book does not go out of its way to introduce the newcomer to the region and its archaeology. For example, without guidance to the contrary, I read ‘centre’ to mean ‘urban centre’ and it took a while to appreciate the broader regional sense intended. This situation is not helped by the relatively sparse visual material, and the maps are particularly disappointing—consultation of Google Maps was enormously helpful here. (On the visual front, the volume also features Routledge's uninspiring boilerplate cover.)

Gijanto provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis that carefully works between documentary and archaeological evidence. It is interesting to observe that, although the book explores the effects of capitalism and colonialism on the everyday experience of the region's inhabitants, these two terms—capitalism and colonialism—are far from prominent. Gijanto certainly connects to the abundant archaeological literature on these topics, but rather than offering ‘another case study’ in the same mould, she presents a distinctive and insightful take on this period of proto-globalisation.

From The Gambia we move to Denmark and Urban consumption: tracing urbanity in the archaeological record of Aarhus c. AD 800–1800 by Jette Linaa. The archaeological records of Niumi and Aarhus could hardly be more different, quantitatively and qualitatively. Nonetheless, Linaa addresses similar themes to those discussed by Gijanto in West Africa, including the experience of living in a place that is increasingly linked into wider maritime trade networks and the consequent changes in everyday consumption practices and social relations.

Chapter 1 introduces the author's ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Theoretical standpoint’, an overview of the ‘History of Aarhus and its archaeological practice’ and a guide to the city's topography. Linaa starts in the world of medieval ceramic studies and works through the specialist literature before shifting gear to consider her wide-ranging reading on consumption, urban studies, identities, entanglement, post-colonialism, actor networks and—as with Gijanto—habitus. (If Bourdieu had a pound for every archaeology book in which he is cited, he would have been a wealthy man!) Linaa's discussion of scholarly influences proceeds book by book and, while it is certainly interesting to learn about her inspirations, it is less clear if and how all of these ideas cohere as an overarching theoretical framework. Several do not feature to any extent in the subsequent chapters, such as queer or outcast archaeology, or the role of the senses, because the data (as the author herself notes. e.g. p. 191) are not always well suited to this sort of analysis and interpretation. Her ambitious aim is “not to study types, dates or functions, but to dig deeper into the human mind” (p. 23), although she also concedes that this is a book dominated by ceramics: “This was not intended, but is a consequence of the nature of the available sources” (p. 37).

Linaa's core dataset of ceramics, plus coins and lead cloth-seals, derives from decades of development-led excavations, the scale of which are strikingly illustrated in fig. 14, showing the locations of some 200 investigations in the centre of Aarhus. From these excavations, Linaa has selected eight assemblages from large projects with high technical standards for her analysis; complementing these are seven assemblages from rural sites. In total, her analysis builds on some 25000 sherds dating from the Viking Age to the nineteenth century, with particular spikes in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Chapter 3, ‘Phases’, briefly explains the correspondence analysis used to sequence the ceramic material, the results conforming with the stratigraphic evidence, and the dates courtesy of the coin evidence. Phase-by-phase overviews of the ceramic evidence then document shifting consumption patterns across 1000 years. Chapter 4, ‘Context’, begins to interpret the significance of the ceramic material. The changing percentages of ceramic forms, for example, document “three consumer revolutions” (p. 147): the adoption of tablewares, especially jugs, in the thirteenth century; the introduction of pans and plates pointing to a shift from porridges to fried foods and individual settings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and the appearance of cups for tea or coffee in the eighteenth century. Similar changes, with a time lag, are documented in the rural hinterland. This chapter also addresses immigration, principally through documents such as wills, and family and place name evidence. Unsurprisingly for a trading centre, foreign merchants, especially Germans, can be traced back to the fourteenth century or earlier, but the population remained predominantly Danish. Much of the urban populace seems to have come originally from the rural hinterland, and here Linaa points to the high turnover of population in the sixteenth century, leading to the interesting suggestion of “a stable group of wealthy families and households and a mobile class of poorer citizens moving in and out” (p. 161).

Chapter 5, ‘Horizons’, draws together the ceramic and contextual evidence of Chapters 3 and 4, with a broader survey of the ceramic evidence from other excavations in the town, to discuss the history of Aarhus through seven chronological ‘stages’. For example, Stage 4, c. AD 1200–1400, represents “a marked change in the consumption patterns in both town and hinterland, i.e. a spread of artefacts indicating contacts with the wider world” (p. 168). This is related to the transformation of the city from a fortified centre to a commercial hub with its new harbour, in the context of the rise of the Hansa; Rhenish stonewares indicate the consumption of German hopped beers in both urban and rural contexts. With each stage, the availability of documentary sources increases, allowing more nuanced interpretation of the archaeological material. For example, by Stage 6, the Early Modern town of the mid sixteenth to mid eighteenth centuries, tax returns allow spatial correlations between districts of relative wealth and ceramic types to be recognised—black pots in back streets points to “[m]arginal spaces for marginalised people” (p. 191).

The concluding Chapter 6 turns to the longer view, assessing the local, regional and supra-regional circulation of ceramics. Linaa points to moments of ‘[u]rban crisis’, for example in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the mid fourteenth century and the mid seventeenth century. These are interspersed with phases of ‘[u]rbanity and urbanisation’ such as the mid thirteenth and mid fifteenth centuries, when major urban developments remodelled or expanded parts of the city. As a result, Linaa sees not one city with a continuous urban history, but rather “a sequence of towns with different purposes, functions and prime motivators” (p. 188). She also addresses the importance of ‘strangers’ (see Gijanto, above) and their role in technology transfer, cultural tastes and trade. Despite the fact that their numbers, as at Juffure in The Gambia, were low, their influence was significant (although unlike Juffure, Aarhus was never a formal colony).

Ultimately, “Urbanity can therefore be thought of as an entanglement of supra-regional and regional culture” (p. 194), with consumption—only one of several modes of urban performance—a means of “collective ritual aimed at group mobilisation” (p. 196). Nonetheless, there was no single common identity within the urban limits of Aarhus, but rather an ongoing cycle of conforming and adapting, suppressing and excluding. Urbanity was “not so much a matter of place, more a state of mind” (p. 198)—particularly significant given the rural origins and practices of the populations to be found living in the streets set back from the centre.

After the under-illustrated Life of trade (above), Urban consumption is a visual feast: an engaging cover, colour charts, crisp distribution maps and an abundance of well-reproduced colour photographs, all interspersed with neatly laid out text and tables. And the English is, of course, excellent—very readable, if occasionally a little repetitive. Linaa presents a detailed, data-rich case study of one city (or perhaps several consecutive cities) across a millennium. This is situated within a well-informed and wide-ranging theoretical framework that links the urban archaeology of Aarhus to a broader range of debates about the effects of (maritime) connectivity, consumption and urbanity.

Fog in the Channel

Bradley, Richard, Haselgrove, Colin, Linden, Marc Vander & Webley, Leo. The later prehistory of north-west Europe: the evidence of development-led fieldwork. 2016. xviii+456 pages, 120 b&w illustrations. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-965977-7 hardback £90.

Bradley, Richard. A geography of offerings: deposits of valuables in the landscapes of ancient Europe. 2017. 222 pages, several b&w illustrations. Oxford & Philadelphia (PA): Oxbow; 978-1-78570-477-2 paperback £15.99.

The next book shifts the scale of analysis from a single city to a large chunk of north-west Europe, stretching from the Loire to the Elbe. What it shares with Linaa's account is the theme of maritime connectivity and the centrality of development-led archaeology. The later prehistory of north-west Europe: the evidence of development-led fieldwork, by Richard Bradley, Colin Haselgrove, Marc Vander Linden and Leo Webley, reports the results of a research project to collate and review the results of thousands of archaeological investigations undertaken in advance of development in north-western Germany, the Benelux countries and northern France. The initial aim of the project was to provide some continental context for an earlier programme that had similarly collated the results of development-led work in the UK and Ireland (Bradley Reference Bradley2007). As the authors explain, however, the new project quickly evolved into a more balanced evaluation of later prehistory across north-west Europe in its own right. There is, of course, an irony of timing here: just as prehistoric Britain is ‘reconnected’ to its continental context, future Britain is cut adrift by Brexit—a development too recent to feature in the book's introductory discussion of the influence of politics on interpretations of European prehistory.

The authors explain how the scale and pace of development-led archaeology has led to “a special problem because responsibility for major projects has often shifted from academic institutions to field archaeologists and heritage managers, with the result that those charged with teaching and research have found it difficult to keep abreast of the new developments” (p. 11). To bridge this gap, the project gathered data from over 5700 investigations undertaken over the past 20 years (combined with a further 3300 from Britain and Ireland), documenting human activity from the late Mesolithic to the Iron Age. Inevitably, the results are unevenly distributed through time and space: later sites are more common than earlier ones; discoveries concentrate in areas of greater development; and different types of archaeological feature are more or less visible. The data cannot therefore be taken at face value—declining settlement numbers, for example, may reflect genuine trends such as settlement nucleation, or may result from changes in the visibility of sites, or variable recovery methods caused by diverse legal obligations, field methods, funding and publication formats. The authors’ introduction reviews all of these issues and more. It also identifies some “fundamental disagreements about the purpose of all this activity”, not least “Is it to document the remains of the past before they are destroyed, or is the main motivation to undertake research?” (p. 37). The authors detect something of a crisis of confidence within the archaeological community but make the case for the value of this material for “writing human history” (p. 37)—indeed, it is their belief that this is its only justification. The following six chapters chart how this material offers the basis for a complete re-evaluation of the prehistory of north-west Europe over 8000 years.

The chapters encompass varied time spans, with the number of centuries covered decreasing as the quantity of material increases over time. The first of these chapters, for example, covers ‘Late foragers and first farmers (8000–3700 BC)’; the final one, Chapter 7, considers just the last few centuries BC. Each introduces the challenges of identifying the archaeological features of the respective periods, and provides an overview of the key themes and problems. Each then works thematically and geographically through the evidence—ranging from artefacts to field systems—supplemented by neat distribution maps and plans of monuments, settlements and landscape features. Chapter 2, on the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic, for instance, considers the practical difficulties of comparing the very different archaeological signatures of these two periods and the conceptual dangers of teleological thinking about increasing social complexity and the advent of farming. Throughout, the chapters tack back and forth between wider questions of interpretation and detailed discussion of the data. An extended treatment of the peculiarities around the adoption of farming in Britain, for example, lays out the opposing camps, introduces the results from development-led work and then the problems of using these data and their possible implications. In this particular case, the authors note that the key developments in relation to the Neolithic derive from lab work (especially dating), but this generally has not been funded by developers. For other periods, new knowledge is manifested through previously unrecognised or under-recorded types of settlement or monument such as Bronze Age roundhouses and fortifications.

Chapter 3 covers ‘Regional monumental landscapes (3700–2500 BC)’, with the Bell Beaker phase the first to show widely shared practices across Western Europe—although Britain was still doing its own thing. Chapter 4, named for the ubiquitous monument of the period—‘Barrow landscapes across the Channel (2500–1600 BC)’— documents new regional diversity accompanied by growing evidence for connectivity and exchange between these regions. Chapter 5, ‘Changes in the pattern of settlement (1600–1100 BC)’, documents a new sense of, and attachment to, place. With the first millennium BC, the quantity of evidence increases significantly: Chapter 6 examines ‘The expansion of settlement’ (1100–250 BC)’ and Chapter 7 brings the chronological survey to a close with ‘Total landscapes (250 BC to the Early Roman period)’, the latter, the largest chapter in the book, covering the shortest time span. The authors acknowledge that the evidence from these later centuries is likely to be more visible than that of earlier periods, but they are firmly of the opinion that it also represents demographic expansion linked with agricultural intensification (possibly assisted by climatic amelioration). Yet increasing numbers of radiocarbon dates are beginning to suggest that there were cycles of growth and decline within even these few short centuries. A brief but widespread phase of abandonment during the first century BC may, for example, be linked to the emergence of—and experimentation with—central places, or oppida. Overall, there appears to be greater investment in place, including the preference for rebuilding houses on the same spot, which, combined with an increasingly ordered and divided landscape, is taken to indicate growing control of families over land and emergent concepts of property and tenure, and a sense of rights and obligations in an increasingly densely inhabited landscape. Nonetheless, variation across north-west Europe persisted with rectilinear enclosed sites in northern France, longhouse villages on the Northern European plain and the construction of new features such as banjo enclosures in Wessex and distinctively British long-distance dykes and the so-called territorial oppida.

Chapter 8, ‘The research in retrospect’, offers a long-term perspective on the key themes. These include the large-scale, long-term shifts in the investment of resources in—and hence highly varied visibility of—funerary and domestic activity. The authors tentatively link these cycles to the relative importance of ancestors and households respectively; one effect of this variable visibility is that reliable demographic estimates are not possible for some periods. An important point that emerges from the analysis is that, in many cases, research excavations and development-led work are complementary, concentrating on different types of sites and even different periods. In relation to the project's main research question, the authors observe that north-west Europe was never a completely coherent unit, but was always inter-connected; even the British Isles can only claim two phases of particular isolation—the late Mesolithic and the fourth/third millennium BC. Overall, the volume makes a clear case for the importance of synthesising the mass of material generated over the past 25 years—working across national boundaries, across various archaeological specialisms and across the longue durée.

The first author of The later prehistory, Richard Bradley, is also the sole author of the next volume under review: A geography of offerings: deposits of valuables in the landscapes of ancient Europe. There is some overlap between the two volumes—geographically, chronologically and thematically—although the focus narrows to concentrate on deliberate depositions of artefacts and the timespan extends well into the medieval period. And whereas The later prehistory is predominantly descriptive, situating new discoveries within existing debates, A geography of offerings sets out to weave the evidence into a new and ambitious interpretive account.

The book is the latest addition to the ‘Oxbow Insights in Archaeology’ series, which aims, according to the publisher's website, “to free the author from the strictures of REF [the UK's Research Excellence Framework] or other academic point-scoring and give them the opportunity to say what they want (and feel) on a subject or theme of their choice to a wide audience”. Whether Bradley himself really requires such liberation is debatable, but he has certainly taken the opportunity offered by this format. The book connects the study of artefacts with landscapes, and the work of prehistorians with archaeologists of historical periods, in order to understand deposits as a long-term phenomenon practised for millennia. Specialists of different periods treat these deposits in isolation, coming to different, even contradictory conclusions (Romanists in particular are called out for their persistent reliance on anecdotal explanations: “In a field rife with speculation this [. . .] has the qualities of farce” (p. 42). More widely, Bradley also discerns “a case in which [archaeologists] have too much material at their disposal and not enough ideas with which to address it” (p. 3), an observation that links back to The later prehistory (above); simply collecting data will not give rise to new or better understanding; we also need new ways of thinking about the evidence. Here, Bradley offers his take on how this material might be rethought.

Chapter 2 looks at the interpretation of specialised deposits on either side of the Roman frontier on the Rhine, and considers how different research traditions and source materials have shaped approaches. Chapter 3 undertakes a similar exercise to show how the academic division of labour between prehistorians, Romanists and medievalists has had analogous effects. Chapter 4 shows how the nature of the evidence misleads archaeologists and, in particular, how the emphasis on metalwork comes at the expense of other deposited materials. Chapter 5, ‘The hoard as a still life’, compares hoards to seventeenth-century Dutch paintings (Pronkstillevens) that portray collections of exotic and expensive items to display social status through conspicuous consumption—the very same types of paintings that feature in Urban consumption (above). A “Predilection for accumulating valuables from distant areas” (p. 86) is also found in pictorial representations of metal artefacts on rock surfaces. In relation to the Early Bronze Age, Bradley connects these images with the display of objects before their deposition, the latter are then simply the residue of such displays and just one component of a much more elaborate sequence of events en route to deposition.

Chapters 6 and 7 look at the artefacts—their material properties and their biographies—and how these might better explain the choice and treatment of deposited objects. The broad division between ‘jade’ axes in Western Europe and copper axes in Eastern Europe, for example, may look more like a shared trend if the (green) colour of the objects is emphasised instead of their contrasting materials. Conversely, treating bronze and iron as metals may obscure important differences in how they are worked (as liquids or solids). Bradley also considers the treatment of artefacts prior to deposition, including burning and fragmentation, and the evidence for various weight and number combinations that may have been a means to establish the ‘value’ of deposits. In relation to the idea that deposits were thank-offerings—a portion of a collection of metal intended for recycling returned to the ground by metalworkers—he observes that “It is ironic that the most important evidence of all never survives, for it was the raw material that went on to make other things. A neutral description would characterise this as recycling, but again the process of making and using these artefacts brought them back to life . . . a kind of regeneration” (p. 141). Chapter 8 considers why objects might have been deposited and the significance of putting them beyond retrieval. Chapter 9 connects the artefacts and deposits to their wider landscape contexts by considering the qualities of these places; water, for example, has distinctive properties of its own that can give meaning to the decision to deposit artefacts in wet places. Finally, Chapter 10 explores how to rethink deposits and the landscape with ideas about liminality and animism.

Bradley argues that current thinking about hoards is “rapidly approaching exhaustion” (p. 7). In particular, metal-detecting and the Portable Antiquities Scheme risk (among other things) giving rise to “a new antiquarianism” (p. 7), putting the focus back onto de-contextualised objects. Instead, Bradley offers a new ‘geography of offerings’ that builds squarely on the achievements of earlier research, but which is much more ambitious and imaginative.

This is a deeply literate, and literary, account. Bourdieu and Braudel, for example, are replaced by W.H. Auden and James Joyce, and we are treated to such subtitles as ‘Northern lights’ and ‘Southern comforts’. Bradley warns of the “Perils of a practical understanding of hoards and related deposits” (p. 56), and instead argues for “An alternative route [that] is more circuitous and involves some subjective judgements but [. . .] it may bring researchers a little closer to understanding the character of events that left such distinctive traces behind [. . .] we must reanimate the objects we intercept in their passage between different worlds” (pp. 197–98). Yet this account is also squarely based on the evidence, including some of that covered in The later prehistory (above), and Bradley goes out of his way to identify and dismiss anecdotal ‘explanations’. Building upon, but greatly expanding, his earlier influential work, this small book will be widely read and much appreciated for the way in which it demonstrates that ‘big data’ also require big ideas.

Islands in the stream

Carson, Mike T.. Archaeological landscape evolution: the Mariana Islands in the Asia-Pacific region. 2016. xiii+307 pages, several b&w illustrations. Heidelberg: Springer; 978-3-319-31399-3 hardback £66.99.

Our final book takes us to Remote Oceania. In Archaeological landscape evolution: the Mariana Islands in the Asia-Pacific region, Mike T. Carson narrates the intertwined histories of the physical landscape and its human inhabitants following the initial settlement of the islands c. 1500 BC. The remoteness of the Marianas makes this date surprisingly early (the longest-known human sea crossing at that point and one not easily predicted by the modelling of Fitzpatrick & Callaghan Reference Fitzpatrick and Callaghan2013). This early date possibly explains some oddities, such as the late introduction of domesticated animals—even the rat (c. AD 900–1000)—compared to most other Pacific islands, as well as the distinct genetic lineages of the Chamorro population. Yet Carson argues that these remote islands serve as a case study of much wider relevance, demonstrating how humans encountered and modified pristine environments. The introduction duly lays out a general theoretical position, careful to avoid either cultural or environmental determinism, but touching only lightly (given the wider aims) on concepts such as niche construction theory.

The content and organisation of the subsequent chapters are unusual: not least, each chapter is provided with its own bibliography, and, although the book is a coherent whole, there is considerable overlap, and even repetition, between the stand-alone chapters. Carson starts, in Chapter 2, with three long-term case studies from the Asia-Pacific region: coastal China, California and the Hawai‘ian Islands. The first of these starts with the presence of Homo erectus 700000 years ago, moving forward through the effects of changing sea levels on human occupation and modification of the coast. These case studies provide regional context, with specific aspects echoed in the subsequent discussion of the Marianas, such as the observation that, in China, despite the early and persistent occupation of coastal areas, the initial experiments with sedentism and agriculture were in river valleys and inland areas. Chapter 3 turns to the Marianas and provides an overview of their geological origins, changing sea levels (documented by radiocarbon dating of coral reefs and tidal notches), geomorphological developments, climate and weather, and plant and animal communities. Chapter 4 outlines the archaeology and heritage of the islands, noting that, until recently, there has been little interest in the earliest settlement of the Marianas; instead, attention has been dominated by the remains of megalithic house-pillar ruins (resembling staddle stones), known as latte, which date to the start of the second millennium AD.

Having outlined the environment and archaeology of the islands, Chapter 5 turns to ‘Coordinating perspectives of the past’. Time is important here and, as with Gijanto (above), Carson looks to Braudel's multiple scales of time. He then outlines the historical events, linguistics and human genetic evidence (although archaeologically visible burial evidence is scarce before AD 1000). Zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical evidence indicates that shellfish were a particularly important food source, with no domesticated animals (e.g. pig, dog and chicken) until the arrival of Europeans. There is also limited evidence for agricultural management in the form of fields, terraces and irrigation. Rather, there was informal management of forests to supply breadfruit, coconut, betel nut and, later, yam, sugar cane and taro. Intriguingly, Carson notes a discrepancy between the archaeological evidence for the earliest settlers c. 1500 BC and consistent indicators from coring for an “anthropogenic impact horizon” (p. 100) of charcoal particles from forest burning; the dating could be as early as 2200–2000 BC. If this is the work of humans, it would represent an even earlier settlement date—and would imply a 500-year aceramic phase. Chapter 6 reviews the ‘Range of archaeological material culture’, including extraordinarily thin, and sometimes decorated, ceramics produced locally by potters who brought well-established skills from their homeland.

Part II turns to the ‘Chronological sequence’. Chapter 7 outlines how the chronological framework has been established, largely through radiocarbon dating. This provides seven basic periods, from 1500 BC to the present. In turn, these periods form the basis for the following seven chapters (the concordance of periods and chapters in fig 7.3 is incorrect). The first of the chronological chapters, ‘1500–1100 BC, initial settlement’ (Chapter 8), examines the evidence for the earliest human settlers in the form of red-slipped pottery at eight or so sites across the archipelago. These early sites were concentrated on the former coastline, although they are now situated some distance inland beneath 2m of sediment. At 1500 BC, there are only a few candidates for the possible homeland of the settlers, and Carson points to the Philippines on the basis of ceramic parallels. Post moulds indicate substantial stilt-raised domestic structures, with hearths, situated in the inter-tidal zone (similar to the ‘floating villages’ of Southeast Asia). Over time (Chapter 9, 1100–700 BC), however, changing sea levels and growing population led to a shift inland and a consequent reorientation and broadening of resource exploitation with associated cultural change (Chapter 10, 700 BC to AD 1). The stone-pillar latte structures, which seem to echo the earlier wooden stilt houses on the coast, appeared from c. AD 1000 (Chapter 13, ‘A sea of islands and monuments’). Formal burial also appears at this time, pointing to new investment in place.

Part III, ‘Pursuing research questions’, offers three short chapters on the major themes. Chapter 15, ‘First inhabiting of a landscape’, returns to the identity and motivations of the initial settlers; Chapter 16, ‘Long-term human-environment relations’ looks for wider resonance in the case of the Marianas for understanding how people change, and are changed by, their environments. Finally, Chapter 17 sketches brief ‘Future directions’. Here Carson argues for a form of “bilingualism” (p. 300) to allow people to accommodate capitalism and globalisation with a more traditional understanding of landscapes.

Carson explicitly acknowledges that he does not advocate any single theoretical framework or overarching explanation. Instead, the main device used is the contention that the Marianas provide a glimpse of “humankind's ‘last look at Eden’” (p. 280). It provides an example of how humans interact with new environments, exploiting new niches but also recreating familiar landscapes. For the initial settlers, the Marianas offered some similarities to their homeland, but they also required adaptations: “The overall result was a bottle-neck subset of the homeland's more diverse traditions and ways of interacting with the landscape” (p. 282). There is, however, a tension in that the very remoteness that permits this window onto how humans adapt to pristine environments makes it less likely that these islands offer a direct model of how colonising peoples experienced other less-remote landscapes. Nonetheless, we are presented with a fascinating case study of how humans can be both extraordinarily adaptable and astonishingly conservative.

At over 2000km from the Philippines, the prehistoric settling of the Marianas was an impressive feat. Yet it is still another 10000km to the west coast of North America. That's a long way even by aeroplane, let alone by boat, and it's no surprise that humans reached the New World by land, not sea, far to the north. For our purposes, the Marianas therefore represent a natural conclusion to this exploration of maritime connectivity.