The Oxford Handbook of the Prehistoric Arctic is another wonderful addition to Oxford's ambitious and magisterial handbook series, of which more than two dozen volumes to date have been devoted to archaeology. With nearly 1,000 pages and 41 chapters written by experts in their respective fields, this grand tome will be the authoritative work on Arctic archaeology for a long time to come.

The handbook is divided into three parts. The first focuses on broad themes and topics in Arctic prehistory. An introduction is followed by chapters on genetics, stable isotope analyses, zooarchaeology, trade and exchange, community-based archaeology, and the indigenous use of wood, stone, and (refreshingly) metal. Each of the latter raw materials deservingly gets a chapter, but bone, ivory, and antler do not, which is a curious omission considering that these raw materials were arguably more important for tool manufacture than metal—and maybe even wood—for most Arctic peoples for most of Arctic prehistory. Part II tackles the incredibly complex western Arctic record, which begins with the pioneering terminal Pleistocene colonization of the continent and ends at the dawn of the historic period and which encompasses an astounding array of temporally and geographically overlapping cultures and communities stretching from the eastern shores of northeast Asia to the Mackenzie Delta. The vast area east of the Mackenzie to Greenland is addressed in Part III, which focuses on a series of eastward Paleo/Inuit migrations that took place in prehistory and the environmental and social challenges each group faced after settling in.

The editors state at the outset that culture, rather than region, is the primary organizing principle of the volume, meaning that the archaeological record of Inuit, Aleut, Yupik, and related peoples is fully addressed, regardless of where it is found. Accordingly, there are chapters devoted to the Paleo/Inuit record of southern Alaska, the Aleutians, Labrador, and even the North Shore of Quebec. The Amerindian/First Nations archaeological record—which is primarily, but not exclusively, Subarctic—is only briefly and variably covered. There is some discussion of the colonization of Beringia and the subsequent Northern and Shield Archaic; there are also two chapters devoted to the interior northwest Subarctic region, which encompasses the northern Athapaskans and their predecessors and, in its eastern reaches, the Caribou Inuit. The Amerindian/First Nations archaeological record of the eastern Subarctic is not included in this volume, but it is discussed in The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology (2012). The central Subarctic seems destined to remain in purgatory or else to get its own handbook.

The opening pages of this volume include a useful chart that outlines the broad culture history of the Arctic as well as full-page maps of both the western Arctic and eastern Arctic, with the locations of important sites indicated. The remainder of the volume is nicely illustrated, too, with drawings of artifacts, photographs, charts, and tables. The volume's chapters are both comprehensive and current (there are even references to works published in 2015!) and for the most part well written, although a handful of contributions are both so dense with information and so economical with the word count as to be nearly unreadable; of course, I can sympathize with these authors’ plight, having been afforded 750 words to review a book with 1,000 pages.

Several themes emerge out of this volume that speak to the broad course of indigenous history in the Arctic; the often rapid movement of people into new or (then) uninhabited lands and out of them (abandonment); the intensification and deintensification of subsistence economies, including the development of specialized maritime and terrestrial adaptations; environmental change and how it dovetails (or doesn't) with periods of human migration and changes in subsistence strategies; episodes of contact and social interaction within and between different peoples; and regional differences in culture and history, especially between the eastern Arctic and western Arctic. Anyone familiar with Arctic prehistory will already have some inkling of these issues, but reading the book cover to cover certainly left quite an impression on me as to their predominance. The coeditors have done a fine job of capturing the cultural and historical tenor of the Arctic and assembling contributions from scholars that can help tell its interesting archaeological stories. This book is an essential resource for anyone interested in Arctic archaeology.