St. Catherines Island, one of the barrier islands of the Georgia coast, is today roughly the shape of Madagascar but the size Manhattan—59 square kilometers (shape and size have changed greatly over time). Half of the island now is tidemarsh or wetlands. David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History has worked on archeological sites on the island over the past thirty-five years. This book is, presumably, the culmination of his prodigious labors, and those of his twenty-five “contributors.”

One could not wish for a more thorough study. The level of detail is impressive, but such that only fellow archeologists will want to wallow in it. If you want to know the percentage of biomass accounted for by the diamondback terrapin in zooarcheological assemblages at any of six sites on the island, you can find it here. Research libraries ought to acquire the book; most of the individuals deeply interested in it probably worked on the project. Others may find it rewarding to peruse as an example of state-of-the-art archeology. In this latter respect it is an object lesson in the ingenuity and doggedness of archeologists. The sole consideration that seemed to me perhaps underplayed was climate change, which has come in for detailed treatment in some long-term archeological studies of other parts of the world.

The scope of the book runs from about 3000 b.c.e. until about 1700 a.d., that is, the span of human occupation of the island through the Spanish mission period. The book is organized around four main research questions. First, how and why did settlement patterns and land use change over time? Second, how much did population growth matter to settlement and subsistence? Third, how to account for growing social stratification on the island? Fourth, can archeology resolve some of the ethnohistorical debates surrounding the Guale chiefdom (and Amerindian polity on the Georgia and north Florida coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)? Previous scholars, using textual evidence generated by Jesuits, differed sharply as to whether the Guale were a mobile people or a settled chiefdom; the archeology strongly suggests the latter.

The most interesting discussions (to this non-archeologist) come in chapters 34 and 35, and concern questions of population growth, health, and social inequality. For thousands of years the inhabitants of St. Catherines Island lived as foragers and hunters. The coasts and tidemarshes provided plentiful food. But as they grew more numerous they became less healthy and more socially stratified, a trend confirmed with the adoption of maize farming shortly after 1300 a.d. Indeed they also became shorter in stature, and thinner-boned. Throughout the book, great stock is placed on population as a driving force behind social change. The data and their interpretation will provide grist for Malthusians' mills. Personally, I found the emphases in the book entirely plausible, but one must remember that much else might have been at work that left no trace, or fainter trace, in the archeological record.