Te Pito o Te Henua, Rapa Nui, or the ‘Belly Button of the World’, best known to foreigners as Eastern Island or Isla de Pascua, was the last territory occupied by the Chilean state during its late nineteenth-century expansion. Since then, the island, 2,000 miles from the nearest inhabited land, has become a synonym for exoticism and exploitation. It was only in 1967 that the Chilean state granted citizenship rights to the impoverished Rapa Nui people, and only in recent years have the claims for autonomy or full sovereignty gained momentum. The growing number of cross-disciplinary studies devoted to the islanders is part and parcel of this contemporary struggle for recognition. This book, put together by historian Miguel Fuentes in the centenary of the Angata Rebellion, brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and heritage studies experts to consider the critical period of 1895–1953, when Chile exerted sovereignty through the delegation of territorial control to the Compañía Explotadora de Isla de Pascua (Easter Island Exploiting Company, CEDIP).

The book has 15 chapters, plus a long introduction and three annexes, and is organised in four thematic sections preceded by helpful short prologues: archaeology and architecture; anthropology and history; heritage sites, identity, and memory; and, lastly, lands and ethnic conflict. In the introduction, Fuentes provides a general overview of the island's socio-economic history from the ‘social collapse’ of the 1860s – a result of Peruvian, French and Chilean slave raids – to the post-1960s achievement of a civil, non-military, political status. By focusing on the indigenous agencies and the ways they transformed the regime over time, Fuentes articulates Chile's shifting coloniality and the mechanisms of exploitation and political dominance. Considering the reconfiguration of dominance and everyday resistance as different expressions of sovereignty, Fuentes puts into context the rebellions of 1914 and 1964–5. The latter marks the opening of a political period that continues to this day, defined by reaffirmations of ethnic identity within a Chilean national framework. The author's quest for expressions of sovereignty (in the public and private spheres) is interesting, though not enough space is devoted to making explicit the guiding concepts (e.g. the diverse forms of dominion Chile implemented through a century of formal control). This introduction is key to understanding the insights of most of the other contributions, which otherwise are rather too specific for non-specialists.

The first section contains five chapters that discuss the archaeological and architectural history of the colonial occupation, concentrating on the Compañía Explotadora's industrial vestiges, in contrast with the pre-historical character of the indigenous monumental constructions. Francisco Rivera and Flora Vilches's chapters reflect the tension between everyday objects and artistic and patrimonial artworks, in suggestive (but somewhat cryptic) narratives that combine theory and research experience. The two authors provide an interesting point of departure for Ariel Torres's description of sheep-shearing machines, critical for the profitability of the Compañía's livestock operations. They also identify two research teams’ findings on the sheep station and on Rapa Nui's stone-wall enclosure, providing a technical reconstruction of spatial colonisation. In the third section, ‘Anthropology and History’, Rolf Foerster does something similar although far more comprehensive in respect of the economics of the CEDIP, reconstructing its boards of directors, shareholders, costs and expenses between 1903 and 1953. He argues against understanding the island's economy as that of a sheep-station. Instead, he proposes that the population's ‘sovereignty’ was expressed in its day-to-day relationship with the company. This idea is interesting, though rather hidden away within his text, and it may be necessary to resort to his vast output on colonial Rapa Nui in order to appreciate it fully. The chapters by Francisca Ramírez and Bárbara Escobar on nutrition, and by Valentina Fajreldin on medical institutions and morbidity, do not integrate the discussion on sovereignty with that of the medical institutions of the company and the state. As the chapters show, the demographic impact of the colonial intervention until the early twentieth century was brutal. In ‘Scarcity vs Abundance’, Ramírez and Escobar argue for reconsidering indigenous food agency in light of discourses of poverty. According to the authors, even when facing food shortages, the population was able to reproduce its traditional reciprocities, escaping the modernising logic of impoverishment: they identify signs of resistance in the denunciation of acculturation. More evidence would be needed to strengthen and substantiate this argument.

In the section ‘Heritage, Memory and Rapa Nui Identity’, Riet Delsing introduces three chapters: one on historical archaeology regarding sheep farming and coloniality, by Cristián Moreno, and two on heritage protection. Moreno's brief chapter centres on the ‘domestication of the colonial power’ as a riposte to what he calls the ‘black legend’ of the Compañía's rule, something difficult to prove in seven pages aimed at appraising excavations and conservation. Moreno's perspective is supported by Georgianna Pineda, who writes on the Vaitea industrial complex, and Francisco Torres, who explores the design and implementation of conservation policies. Both chapters defend popular participation in the archaeological decision-making process, a tendency apparently opposed by the rigid centralism of the Chilean state.

The fourth section, ‘Land and Ethnic Conflict’, addresses the problematic relation between the juridical, political and social history of conflict between Chilean colonialism and the Rapa Nui people. Cristián Moreno's prologue situates the anthropologist Riet Delsing's essay on current territorial conflicts in a longer-term perspective. For Delsing, the right to self-determination is anchored in the Polynesianality of the local culture, an argument linked to several arguments raised in the two post-2010 documents included in this fourth section: a political statement by the Rapa Nui Parliament that could with profit be read before any other part of the book, and another statement by the secretariat of the Chilean Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (Workers’ Unitary Central, CUT). The Secretaría Campesina y de Pueblos Indígenas (Countryside and Indigenous People's Secretariat) discusses some definitions and prospects; though to the point and well argued, its actual national and local reach is debatable. Finally, the annexes comprise documents on critical anthropology and archaeological georeferences.

With its combination of research advances, essays, and well-documented prologues, the compilation provides interesting contributions to comparative studies on late, postcolonial colonialism in the Age of Empire (a barely considered framework). The book contains a very wide-ranging set of studies, well suited for specialists in the history and anthropology of occupations, and those interested in current debates on heritage and archaeology. It provides a number of contributions and questions regarding contemporary debates on identity politics and the return of sovereignty to the population after years of state rule, in turn administered by the military, delegated to the Compañía Explotadora and exercised through sheep farming.