Sustainable, predictable, and easily seen and gathered resources of coasts and estuaries underpinned the broad-spectrum revolutions that enabled increasing sedentism, population, and social complexity in many parts of the world, but perhaps nowhere more so than along the Pacific coast of South America where nutrients in cold upwellings support a prodigious marine food chain and, today, the world's richest fishery. Substantiated by data preserved by aridity even over millennia, ideas here about the origins and subsequent functioning of complex polities have long been intimately associated with the exploitation of rich marine resources. For almost the last half century those ideas have been shaped—some might say ossified—by the work of two scholars in particular, each at opposite ends of the chronological spectrum.

Michael Moseley's (1975) Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (MFAC) hypothesis promulgated the idea that Late Preceramic civilization along this coast had first arisen based on the exploitation of such marine resources, thereby challenging the axiom that agriculture was necessary for the rise of complex societies. Around the same time María Rostworowski's seminal research into Spanish colonial documentation (inter alia, Costa peruana prehispánica, 1977) revealed facets of the prehispanic worlds first encountered, and subsequently remade, by Europeans, including not least those of specialist, endogamous fishing communities with separate social and even linguistic identities from coastal farming communities. The enduring influence of these ideas on subsequent research agendas is evident throughout this landmark new publication, providing, in the former case, an hypothesis to be refuted, corroborated, or refined by archaeological findings or ecological theory; and, in the latter, an ethnohistorical model to be projected back into the past to inform archaeological interpretations.

Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes brings together contributions from more than 40 senior and younger scholars now shaping those research agendas for the Pacific coasts of Ecuador, Peru, and Chile and epitomized by its editors: Daniel Sandweiss, whose scholarship has contributed so much to archaeological and climate history orthodoxies, and Gabriel Prieto, one of a new generation already redefining parts of those orthodoxies. Prieto and Sandweiss begin the book with an excellent introduction that distills a succinct and coherent review of the history of archaeological studies in this region to set the context for overviews of each of the contributing chapters. Their editorial aspiration is to go beyond “mere subsistence practices and technological aspects” to elaborate how maritime communities were “embedded in social, economic, and ideological dynamics”; and indeed, the book's best contributions are exemplars of using multiproxy evidence of the former to interpret the latter. Maritime Communities is structured chronologically.

Part I covers the earliest coastal adaptations through a long Preceramic or Archaic period, defined by increasingly complex (fisher) hunter-gatherer societies and critical changes, including the gradual incorporation of agriculture and the stabilization of postglacial eustatic sea levels. Findings from the north coast of Chile reviewed by Santoro, Salazar, and colleagues offer insight into social organization, even at these great time depths. Dillehay synthesizes multidisciplinary investigations of Huaca Prieta/Paredones, Chicama, on the north coast of Peru, reveal millennia of social changes through, inter alia, architecture and the unfolding mix between marine and, increasingly, cultivated terrestrial resources. These culminated in the Late Preceramic around 5000 cal BP, coeval with the florescence of new forms of ideological power, manifest in the monumental constructions in Norte Chico, on the central Peruvian coast, discussed by Creamer and Haas in Part II.

The mixed economies of the Late Preceramic are envisaged here as separated between specialist fishing and farming communities, implicitly invoking an analogy with Rostworowski's ethnohistory. In contrast, however, the investigations comprising the rest of Part II—of contemporary coastal and inland Early Horizon sites in Nepeña, led by Helmer and Chicoine, respectively, and especially of the Initial Period site of Gramalote, Moche Valley, by Prieto and Sutter—imply the intermingling of fishing and farming within those ancient maritime communities.

Maritime communities discussed in Parts III and IV are much more proximate to those studied through the lens of history. Ramírez offers just such a lens for sixteenth-century Chicama, made up of endogamous fishing communities with no agricultural lands, like those described by Rostworowski. Investigations of Billman and colleagues near Chan Chan, Moche Valley; Marcus and colleagues of Cerro Azul, Cañete; and Stothert and colleagues along the coast of Ecuador, however, use archaeological data to show considerable fluidity in the fishing-farming configurations by which these respective maritime communities interacted with larger polities such as the Late Intermediate Chimú and Late Horizon Inca empires. VanValkenburgh and colleagues, meanwhile, use archaeological data for the Zaña Valley to critique the historical narrative, arguing that there maritime communities feigned fishing specialization to avoid land-based tributes exacted by the Spanish.

Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes is a timely and important compendium of recent studies. Pace Moseley's original MFAC hypothesis, these assign earlier and greater significance to cultivated food plants in the social, demographic, and political changes that culminated in the Late Preceramic. Yet some of that new orthodoxy is defined by plant microfossil data that come with their own limitations of context, dating, and even contamination (Mercader et al., Facets 3:777–797). Where these are incongruent with other evidence, questions remain. So far as it exists, for instance, direct evidence for diet in the isotopic signatures of Preceramic coastal communities affirms compelling significance to marine foods and, pace Creamer and Haas here, very little to maize. And while maritime resources here are sensitive to ENSO perturbations, the contributions of Goepfert, Marcus, and their respective colleagues to this volume illustrate the complexities of those impacts: ephemeral booms in some resources accompanied by busts in others. Finally, many of the exemplary studies in Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes would seem to emphasize how, rather than forever being incompatible specializations, fishing and farming were often carried out within the same society so that, for this reviewer at least, it is their compatibility that should lie at the heart of the MFAC hypothesis.