Niah Cave is one of the key sites for documenting the prehistory of island Southeast Asia. Everything about it, from its massive size, the length of its occupation and the demands placed on those involved in its excavation, has a heroic dimension. Located behind the northern coast of Sarawak, Niah was subject to the massive environmental changes that characterised the later Pleistocene freeze and the global warming that inundated Sundaland. The research described in this second volume reporting on the 2000–2004 fieldwork reflects the combined and integrated analyses of 46 specialists under the baton of Graeme Barker. The musical analogy is appropriate, as harmonising such a range of inputs requires both a steady beat of encouragement and precise timing of the finale. The saga of Niah began in 1954, when Tom Harrisson, the curator of the Sarawak Museum, visited the cave complex and described his impressions of its potential as incredible and fantastic. He also appreciated that unprecedented resources would be needed to do the site justice, beginning with the use of a Second World War landing craft simply to gain access to the area at the start of a decade of excavations in 1957. In this endeavour, he was fortunate to have the vital input of his wife, Barbara.

More than four decades later, Barker and his team returned to Niah to deploy all the available analytical techniques that have evolved since the Harrissons completed their excavations. Without the availability in the Sarawak Museum of the original records, notes, photographs and samples of the artefacts and biological remains, it is hard to see how this new research could have progressed, for the fieldwork concentrated on taking samples from the old excavation trenches. The reinterpretation of the sections, left open and subject to 60 years of deterioration, and the sampling strategy for dating material and organic remains from the many sequences across the cave complex, would have presented insurmountable difficulties without archived records, and the book's chapters consistently refer back to them. Niah is a key site for many reasons, not least the discovery of a human cranium, the so-called ‘Deep Skull’ that has for many years been seen as the earliest evidence for Homo sapiens in Southeast Asia. Redating it was an essential part of the research programme.

The field research thus involved sampling the exposed sections identified through the original records, with only very limited new excavation. Over five seasons, this involved a total of 13 weeks in the field. The first of three central objectives was to identify the timing of the arrival of Anatomically Modern Humans in Southeast Asia. This led on to the adaptation of hunter-gatherers to an environment that, for the greater part of the sequence, was dominated by rainforest. The cave incorporates one of the larger cemeteries yet documented in island Southeast Asia to be associated with the establishment of a farming community. The third objective, focused on the same period, evaluates the model of a southward expansion of Austronesian-speaking rice farmers, ultimately from the lower Yangtze region and Taiwan.

The volume comprises seven printed sections and a CD-ROM containing supplementary materials. The first section sets the scene by describing the methodology employed during the Harrisson campaigns, and the relationships between the old and the new areas examined, before describing the present-day environment. It is liberally illustrated with photographs culled from the Harrisson archive. The fieldwork confronted a challenging situation: over half a century of deterioration presented plant growth, section collapse, insect burrowing and general disorder. Once identified against the original records, sections were scraped back in order to take the samples needed to deploy the range of analytical techniques. These included sufficient material for flotation, pollen analysis, charcoal for radiocarbon-dating, the recovery of starch grains, phytoliths and soil for microstratigraphy, indeed all the materials intensively analysed and reported in the subsequent sections. One can visualise the intense scrutiny necessary to relate the new with the old by the illustration of samples being extracted from newly exposed but essentially decayed and eroded baulks. At the same time, the fieldwork extended well beyond Niah in order to trace the environmental changes that have taken place during and since the Last Glacial Maximum.

Hardly a single scientific method developed over the past 60 years has been overlooked. As in all such exercises, a securely dated cultural sequence is the essential basis for meaningful results, and in Part IV of the report, four chapters address chronology: radiocarbon, uranium series, optical dating of sediments and amino-acid racemisation analysis of shells. The results have resolved the first objective of the research programme, revealing that initial human settlement began about 50000 years ago. There was also a compelling harmony between new radiocarbon dates for the sediments associated with the findspot of the Deep Skull and the uranium-series dating of the skull itself. These converge in the vicinity of 37000 years ago. Any lingering doubt over the crucial date of this cranium can now surely be set aside. So too can another contentious issue: were the early Anatomically Modern Humans who expanded into Southeast Asia, and in due course greater Australia, able to adapt to a rainforest environment? Within its secure chronological framework, the intense analysis of the Niah sequence shows beyond doubt the adaptive ability of the cavern's occupants during and after the Last Glacial Maximum in relation, for example, to subsistence and the development of new forms of composite tools.

The third major objective was to contribute to a continuing debate on the nature of the ‘Neolithic’ expansion into island Southeast Asia. The domestication of rice took place along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and all available evidence on the mainland of Southeast Asia points to a series of expansionary movements south that saw the establishment of farming communities from about 2000 BC. There is a twin model for the spread of rice farmers into Taiwan, the Philippines and so south towards Niah. Farming groups arriving in the islands and on the mainland would have encountered indigenous communities with a 50000-year ancestry of adaptation to hunting, gathering and plant manipulation. To what extent does the mortuary evidence from Niah, involving both burial ritual and the physical remains of the people who lived there, illuminate the identity of the early rice farmers, when they arrived and where they came from? There are two major burial rites in the cemetery of Niah; one involved a flexed position, the other extended. The former is widespread from southern China into Mainland Southeast Asia among hunter-gatherers. The latter is typically associated with intrusive farmers. One might expect the morphometric analysis of human crania to identify a distinction between the flexed and extended individuals, but this is not the case. Both groups are most similar to indigenous Melanesians and Australians. There does not seem to have been a population replacement by new rice farmers at Niah.

Excavating is one thing, publishing a final report is quite another. Given the plethora of new scientific approaches at the prehistorian's disposal, the archaeological landscape is utterly different to that in which the Harrissons worked at Niah. When, two decades ago, Graeme Barker introduced himself to me with his intention to re-examine Niah, I welcomed the news, linked with a batsqueak of doubt. Would he be able to do it justice? The answer contained in this thick volume, not to mention the supplementary CD-ROM, is revelatory. It is, simply, a landmark achievement, one that will surely remain the standard against which all further research will be judged.