This volume derives from a conference held in Cambridge in 2007 on the global origins of seafaring, and contains an impressive range of contributions from international scholars from Europe, the USA and Oceania. The scope of the volume is ambitious and global, and its significance will be found in the diversity of voices and approaches and the important contribution that it will make to rethinking prehistory on the broader scale. As the editors argue, the sea has long been an important factor in human cultural and economic development yet remains, in comparison with the landscapes of prehistory, a markedly understudied resource. This volume starts to redress the balance. In their Foreword, the editors rightly point to gaps in the global coverage, and indeed at some stage in the future the ideas presented in this volume might give rise to a more considered study of ancient African seafaring (as well as early seafaring in the Americas), for example, but it is important to see this volume as an attempt to break the mould of more traditional archaeological approaches to the early history of seafaring, and to embrace a more multidisciplinary outlook.

Chapter One presents a broad context to the archaeological study of seafaring, dealing with early archaeological evidence for the use of boats in relation, in particular, to subsistence strategies, then going on to chart the key technological development in early seafaring: sailing and sail evolution. Six chapters then set the scene in the second section entitled ‘Inferences of early seafaring’; here we are taken through a series of regional case studies which try to grapple with ideas about the backgrounds to the origins of seafaring in areas as diverse as the Mediterranean, Pacific Coast, Arabian Sea, Australasia and the Indo-Pacific region, inter alia. These discussions focus on economic exploitation, human migration patterns and environmental and ecological change as factors in innovation in maritime technology.

The third section takes a more traditional maritime archaeology perspective with two papers, one focusing on the global origins of seafaring and the other more specifically on the picture from the Atlantic and the Baltic. Seán McGrail's chapter especially reflects the fruits of a lifetime’s commitment to maritime archaeology and is a valuable and typically wide-ranging and thought-provoking contribution. A more bio-geographic flavour is evidenced in the fourth section, where seven papers deal in more depth with regional models for Holocene seafaring, looking at specific mechanisms informing innovation and development and using a wider range of theoretical approaches.

The six chapters in the final section are perhaps the most interesting, moving away from the mechanics of models of seafaring origins and bringing us to the important question of the relationships of ships to society. Thus, for example, we learn about the centrality of ships to centres of Tongan political power (Clark), and from Blench we have a characteristically wide-ranging assessment of very diverse categories of evidence for Austronesian contacts in the Indian Ocean, which considers linguistic change, disease and disease vectors, musical instruments and crossbows! A more phenomenological approach to the relationship between sea and landscape is used by Westerdahl, and in contrast Cunliffe embraces a large expanse of time and space in his discussion of later prehistoric seafaring in the Atlantic seaboard zone.

This volume does not pretend to be comprehensive, but its real strength lies in its diversity of approaches and regional case studies, even if there is some overlap in places in terms of subject material and approaches. The main issues of chronology, technological development, human choice, influences and perceptions of landscape, seascape and ecology are all addressed, and, as if to emphasize a pioneering spirit in approaching maritime archaeology from a new direction, the editors, in their epilogue, conjure up a suitable nautical analogy: ‘it is thus appropriate to call for a continuation of the journey’. The diverse and thought-provoking case studies contained in this well-produced volume are a very suitable place to begin.