In his new book, Patrick V. Kirch transports readers to the remote district of Kahikinui on Maui, the second-largest of the Hawaiian Islands, to tell the story of life in the island's backcountry (kua‘āina) in antiquity (kahiko). Like his recent work, A shark going inland is my chief (2012), it is intended to open up to the public what he has previously published in the scholarly literature and to paint a picture of what it was like to do archaeology on Maui; by these measures it is a definitive success. In it we follow two compelling narrative arcs: the puzzling-out of the past through new fieldwork and the struggle of a group of local Kānaka Maoli (native Hawaiians) to reoccupy land from which they have been disenfranchised. These stories are told in documentary style from the author's perspective and cleverly woven together. Although intended for a broad public audience, I find it is also a work that has a lot to teach students of archaeology about ethics.

The story opens in 1993. The author, a tenured professor, returns to Kahikinui after having been introduced to the dry, windy backcountry as a teen and the youngest member of an archaeological survey. But it is more than nostalgia for that formative experience that has drawn him back. Kahikinui is intellectual unfinished business. On the survey back in 1966, young Kirch recorded a massive amount of architecture—stone foundations painstakingly mapped by plane table and alidade—but for reasons explained in the book, the expedition's leader, Peter Chapman, never wrote up the fieldwork. Further, not only had the first attempt at settlement pattern archaeology in Hawai‘i not been satisfactorily analysed, much of the district remained archaeological terra incognita.

The other major narrative arc centres on a Hawaiian cultural renaissance in this quiet corner of the islands. At the time of the author's return visit, a small but dedicated group, Ka ‘Ohana o Kahikinui (the ‘Ohana for short), is petitioning to homestead on government land. Kirch first meets members of the ‘Ohana in their makeshift headquarters at the roadside ruins of an abandoned Catholic church. He learns that one of the bureaucratic barriers used to argue that the land should be leased for cattle instead of homesteaded is that it has always been too rocky and desolate to live in—something that the protestors know to be false. The arcs intertwine when the author tells the ‘Ohana that he knows they are in the right because, as a result of the previous survey, he has “a detailed archaeological map that shows about five hundred and fifty of those ancient sites” (p. 10), representing the homes, fields and sacred sites built by people who lived there in the pre-European-contact era.

The narrative unfolds with Kirch leading new field research stretching over the next 17 years and the ‘Ohana leveraging his academic interest in Kahikinui to make their case to the government. The author deftly bounces between the two themes in short chapters and introduces us to the land and the people of Kahikinui, both local (members of the ‘Ohana, local ranchers), and those drawn to the backcountry by research (the author's students, scientific collaborators and mentors). In the course of the book, the academic team make hard-won progress through survey and excavation as the ‘Ohana make incremental victories on the road to reoccupying the land. The research agenda quickly moves beyond the goals of settlement pattern survey, and Kirch employs household archaeology, which yields a richly detailed picture of the past, as well as landscape archaeology, which helps to address some hard targets such as reconstructing traditional agriculture, palaeodemography and decoding the cultural and political significance of the architectural layout of sacred sites. As the narrative develops, the ‘Ohana are granted their own off-grid homesteads, but the story doesn't end there.

In the final chapters, the narrative arcs converge in snapshots of post-contact-era life. This period is the subject of Kirch's well-known Anahulu collaboration with cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (Kirch Reference Kirch1992; Sahlins Reference Sahlins1992), who himself appears briefly in a lively debate over the discovery of archaeological evidence of nineteenth-century re-use of a sacred site. What sets these final chapters apart as a masterful piece of historical archaeology is how the documentary and archaeological evidence is shown to converge on local disenfranchisement. And so, this history ends where it began, with so much of Kahikinui's former life hidden from view, and ranching the mainstay in this Maui backcountry.

In the epilogue, we return to the backcountry to find that both the author and the ‘Ohana have mixed feelings about what the future holds. Talk of energy production from windfarms marks a new phase for Kahikinui, and for the first time we see cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology—while present earlier in the book—becoming a driving force of archaeology within the district. CRM archaeology has resulted in significant discoveries but, for the author, any development must be weighed against the value of this landscape for education. He points specifically to the potential for teaching local students, especially Kānaka Maoli, about life in old Hawai‘i; an opportunity he was lucky to have as a teenager and is keen for teenagers visiting Kahikinui today to experience.

While not intended as a book about ethics, this is nonetheless the story of an academic archaeologist's efforts to be, in Hawaiian terms, pono (righteous, proper), at a time when to be an archaeologist in some circles was to be a social pariah. For undergraduate students, this is a lesson in archaeological ethics in practice that should be read alongside the literature on clashes over archaeology in Hawai‘i, as well as the growing role of community-driven archaeology. The author also talks about some difficult subjects that would be ideal for challenging students in a graduate seminar on ethics. Moreover, the production of this book itself makes a strong statement about ethics and our responsibility to the public.

Lastly, it should be said that not only are all the archaeological interpretations here backed up by copious bibliographic information, but also that this is an authentic account of the landscape and its people. I had the pleasure of briefly surveying with Kirch on Maui on my way to do my first season of dissertation research on Moloka‘i, and I can say with certainty that he describes the natural landscape, the archaeology and the people in a way that is true to the place, and done in a way that it is accessible to newcomers but which will also be appreciated by those already intimately familiar with Hawai‘i.