The southern boundary of Mesoamerica has been traditionally drawn to include Pacific Nicaragua and neighboring northwestern Costa Rica. This region, Greater Nicoya, shows consistent chronological development for 3,500 years prior to the Spanish invasion (chapter 4). Its inclusion as part of Mesoamerica by Paul Kirchhoff rested partly on the Mesoamerican languages (in the Oto-Manguean and Uto-Aztecan families) spoken when the Spanish arrived and partly on imagery on polychrome pottery first described by Samuel Lothrop in the 1920s. How and when the region acquired its Mesoamerican flavor serves as an organizing theme for this volume, the first major publication on the archaeology of Greater Nicoya in more than 20 years.

Many of the volume’s chapters present results of University of Calgary investigations initiated by Geoffrey McCafferty in 2000 in the Rivas and Granada areas of Pacific Nicaragua. As McCafferty acknowledges (chapter 6), these investigations were conceived partly as an effort to test the “out of Mexico” hypothesis about the origins of people who resided in Greater Nicoya in 1520. The Calgary investigations first targeted Santa Isabel, on the Isthmus of Rivas, then Tepetate, near modern Granada, then El Rayo, on the Asese Peninsula, just south of Granada, and finally Sonzapote, on Zapatera Island, near the western shoreline of Lake Nicaragua. Chapter 6 provides an overview of work done at these sites, while chapter 4 (Steinbrenner and McCafferty) revises the late period chronology based on work at Santa Isabel. Chapters 9 (Steinbrenner) and 10 (Carrie Dennett) examine changes in ceramic production during the Sapoa and Ometepe periods, Steinbrenner focusing on the polychrome pottery types and Dennett using geochemical and petrographic analysis to identify communities of practice in the Rivas and Granada areas. Sacha Wilke (chapter 11) describes nonvessel objects, including fishing tools and objects of personal adornment, from El Rayo. McCafferty et alia (chapter 14) discuss mortuary patterns at all four excavated sites, and Andrea Waters-Rist and McCafferty discuss indicators of health and identity in the skeletal remains from the Bagaces and Sapoá periods at El Rayo. Combined with Steinbrenner’s introduction (chapter 1) and his discussion of the contact period sources (chapter 2), these chapters would make a major contribution to Pacific Nicaraguan archaeology on their own, offering major chronological refinements, ceramic typological refinements, ceramic provenance determinations, detailed descriptions of nonvessel objects, and detailed descriptions of mortuary patterns and osteological data.

Steinbrenner and coeditors also invited contributions from other investigators working in Pacific Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Frederick Lange (chapter 5) reviews some results of the 1990s Metropolitan Managua Project. Karen Niemel Garrard (chapter 7) summarizes data from her settlement survey on the Isthmus of Rivas, which provide a regional context for the Calgary excavations at the main regional center of Santa Isabel. Adam Benfer (chapter 12) traces the history of lithic research beginning with the work of collectors and geologists during the nineteenth century. Suzanne Baker (chapter 13) summarizes current knowledge of the near-ubiquitous rock art of Pacific Nicaragua, including her own large-scale effort to record petroglyphs on the Maderas half of Ometepe Island, and concluding with suggestions for future improvements in documentation and analysis.

From the Costa Rican portion of Greater Nicoya, Anna Cristina Aguilar Vega (chapter 8) and Anayensy Herrera Villalobos and Felipe Solís del Vecchio (chapter 16) contribute chapters on the occupation around the Bay of Culebra. Both chapters suggest that sites around the bay were workshops where shell and/or bone implements were produced within domestic contexts.

Returning to a central theme of the volume, whether or not the “out of Mexico” hypothesis retains some validity, most authors caution against a simplified in-migration scenario for any of the proposed Mexican immigrant groups. As Geurds (pp. 509–510) says in his concluding chapter, the evidence that Indigenous groups could “integrate change and negotiate continuity . . . supersedes earlier, and possibly overstated, notions of uniform ethnic clashes, driven by the deceptively straightforward archaeological tropes of migration and displacement.” In chapter 3, Eugenia Ibarra-Rojas, an ethnohistorian, argues that Pacific Nicaragua and Nicoya (northwestern Costa Rica) should be considered a “pluricultural confluence space,” within which various ethnolinguistic groups known to have been present in 1520 interacted in dynamic and complex ways.

Avoiding oversimplification is indisputably good advice. Nonetheless, AD 800, the date originally suggested by Lothrop for of the arrival of the Chorotega, repeatedly emerges in this volume as a time of dramatic change. Dennett (Chapter 10), for instance, while stressing internal developmental processes of the ceramic economy, also identifies the Bagaces-Sapoá transition at AD 800 as a time of major change that included introduction of new tools, such as molds, proliferation of production centers, and increased standardization. In the nonvessel objects, Wilke (Chapter 11) notes a shift from fishhooks to nets at the Bagaces-Sapoá transition, along with diversification of materials used in pendants and possible shifts in tools for clothing production. Perhaps most saliently, McCafferty et alia (chapter 14) find dramatic shifts in mortuary practices between Bagaces and Sapoá times: urn burials become dominant, remains are burnt and comingled, and, at one locus, isolated skulls outside of urns were associated with well-made chert bifaces similar to those depicted on relief carvings depicting human sacrifice at El Tajín and Chichén Itzá. The Bay of Culebra studies (chapters 8 and 16) both point to mortuary practices and human-bone artifact production as evidence of Mesoamerica-related groups in the region; Herrera Villalobos and Solís del Vecchio (chapter 16) note specific parallels between the local use of human mandibles and maxillae as pendants and the sacrificial offerings in the Moon and Feathered Serpent pyramids at Teotihuacan. Intergroup relations on the southern frontier of Mesoamerica were certainly complicated, and simple equations of pottery styles with ethnolinguistic groups are unlikely to represent reality. Nonetheless, if there is one point of dramatic change in the Greater Nicoya sequence, it is AD 800, the date originally proposed for the arrival of the Chorotega.

Steinbrenner, McCafferty, and their colleagues have produced a major, thought-provoking update on the archaeology of Greater Nicoya. It covers a great deal of hard archaeological data while also providing fresh perspectives on debates about the region’s prehistory. I expect it to be widely read, cited, and argued over for some time to come.