This volume is beautifully presented with clear and informative colour maps by Les O'Neill, and equally clear colour illustrations of key sites and artefact types. There is no doubt that Pacific archaeology needs more of this kind of book, which includes comprehensive summaries of the archaeology of particular archipelagos, providing easy reference to a wide range of published and unpublished (usually doctoral theses) information. Across the wider Island Melanesian region, one can only find comparison in New Caledonia where Christophe Sand and his colleagues have produced similar summaries, synthesising vast amounts of data, which are tremendously valuable as general reference volumes.

Walter and Sheppard have been involved in much of the significant archaeological research that has occurred in the Solomon Islands in recent years, taking up the baton from the late Roger Green, but all research on the Solomons, including my own very modest contribution at its northern end, gets fair coverage. It provides quite a comprehensive summary of research up to around 2015. The volume begins with a short introductory chapter, summarising the initial Pleistocene settlement of the region (discussion of the settlement of Sahul—Australia and New Guinea—has been updated by subsequent work). Chapter 2 offers a reasonable survey of the ‘Cultural geography of the Solomon Islands’, but reveals the problems of writing archipelagic histories where a single modern nation state takes up much of the word count. The decision to include Bougainville, the largest of the geographic Solomons, despite its current status as the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (not the North Solomons Province as the authors have it), within the state of Papua New Guinea is entirely justifiable. But on similar grounds of propinquity and cultural connection, the eastern Solomons, separated from the main Solomons by over 350km of open ocean, could arguably be more appropriately included in a volume on the archipelago of Vanuatu, of which it forms a northern extension. It is included here, of course, because it is part of the modern nation state of the Solomon Islands and the subject of much of Sheppard's own research. Boundaries are always tricky to justify.

Chapter 3 is the least impressive part of the work. We are presented merely with a chronology of who worked where, but get no sense of hypotheses regarding settlement of the Solomons or its wider cultural connections. Western speculations on the origins of the Solomon Islanders began with sixteenth-century Spanish explorers. With the growth of ethnology in the nineteenth century, ideas were promulgated about peoples and cultures that clearly affected the later development of the more strictly archaeological research agendas—which Walter and Sheppard would date to 1964 onwards. These older ideas still have echoes in debates today and need to be unpicked and perhaps deconstructed, but this task is not attempted here.

The Pleistocene and Mid-Holocene discussion (Chapter 4) is a workmanlike summary of the little that is known, concentrating on Stephen Wickler's work at the Kilu site on Buka at the northern end of Bougainville, where a sequence dating back approximately 30 000 years was identified. It seems rather naïve to suggest, as the authors do, that the dating of the only known Pleistocene site accurately marks the date of initial settlement in the archipelago. The idea that Pleistocene settlement somehow lost momentum beyond this northern outpost and that the easternmost islands of the main Solomons were not reached until the Early Holocene, and only sparsely populated, seems unlikely. It is also now contradicted by a recently discovered site on Malaita. There is a sense throughout the book, sometimes stated explicitly, that the broad picture of settlement is accurately reflected in the current state of archaeology. Issues of insufficient sampling are dismissed while, throughout the rest of the book, we are continually reminded of how little we know about particular aspects of the archaeology. Indeed, the book usefully serves to highlight several important topics in need of further research.

Chapter 5 is a superb summary of a very large body of research, clearly defining the contrast between the rich early (3000 BP) Lapita sites found in the eastern Solomons (and in Vanuatu and New Caledonia) and the later, clearly secondary, Lapita expansion found in the northern and western Solomons from about 2700 BP onwards. The central Solomons remain a Lapita-free zone, and the authors make a persuasive case for why that is, based on linguistics and genetics, rather than a simple absence of evidence. This chapter is a joy to read.

Rather too much partially digested information is packed into Chapter 6, resulting in a dense and sometimes confusing summary of the last 2000 years. It is allowed roughly the same page count as the Lapita expansion chapter that precedes it, but covers more than twice the time span. Two chapters, each covering a millennium, would surely have made the information more contextualised and interesting. We are back on more solid ground with the detailed case study in Chapter 7 describing the classic research carried out by the authors and their associates on the Roviana headhunting complex, and its consequences in adjacent areas. This is a great piece of writing and would stand alone as a research article.

The brief conclusion demonstrates that the book is indeed an ‘Archaeology of the Solomon Islands’ as opposed to a ‘Prehistory’, and empirical in focus rather than theoretical. The conclusion provides a summary of the book's contents, but little more beyond the only reference in the entire book to “the world system of the Pacific” (p. 167) and any theoretical perspective on the region's deep past and its social and cultural changes. This sort of book takes one of two avenues: largely descriptive but with comprehensive summaries of research; or an evolutionary approach to the overall cultural sequence that identifies key triggers for change. Only Chapter 7, based on the authors’ own theory-oriented research, details where that latter approach could have taken them. A ‘Prehistory of the Solomon Islands’ remains to be written, although it will certainly take this book as its major guide.