Oceania, defined here as the islands of the Pacific Ocean and maritime Southeast Asia, is a vast region with an archaeological record distributed in patches separated by the sea. Perhaps because of this, its past is often communicated in synthetic narratives that connect island sequences via histories of migration and colonisation, and by universalising theories of human ecology and the development of social complexity. These themes have structured European interests in the region since the Enlightenment, when voyages of exploration drew Pacific societies into dialogue with emerging public discourse on the origins of humanity, the benefits and inequalities of progress, and the fate of populations. While single-authored books on Pacific archaeology provide coherent perspectives on such issues, edited collections are more able to cover alternative viewpoints and highlight debate. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania is a good example of the latter, offering up-to-date surveys of regional sequences and current perspectives on how best to interpret the evidence.
Chapter contributions are mostly organised geographically, travelling from west to east following the routes of human incursion, albeit with occasional interludes focusing on broader topics affecting the entire region (voyaging technologies; sea level changes and coastal morphologies; linguistic relationships; settlement pattern studies). Cochrane and Hunt introduce the volume by identifying three major research themes: colonisation and population origins; subsequent interaction patterns; and changes in political complexity. The first of these are more prevalent earlier in the book, while the last becomes more important in later chapters. One reason for this is that there is a temporal dimension to the geographic coverage, with chapters covering western Oceania focusing on the earliest periods of a lengthy prehistory, while those dealing with the more recently settled east summarise whole sequences. This tracks an overriding interest in disentangling the origins of the occupants of the remote Pacific.
In Chapter 2, O’Connor and Hiscock provide a concise and extremely useful summary of our current understanding of the dispersal of Homo sapiens from mainland Asia into Oceania over 50,000 years ago. Crossing the islands of eastern Indonesia, or Wallacea, into the Pleistocene continent of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea today) and its offshore islands, these early communities clearly had maritime technologies and exploited marine resources. The chapter covers debates about the dates and routes of dispersal, subsistence and colonisation strategies, and processes of megafaunal extinction. Chapters by White and Specht discuss material relevant to this period in New Guinea and its offshore islands, but also describe later transitions in the Holocene, when local forms of food production and resource redistribution become important.
In Chapter 3 Denham examines evidence from Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea, challenging a now orthodox narrative of mid-Holocene Neolithic incursion into the region by Austronesian-speaking migrants from Taiwan. Readers will need to look elsewhere if they are unfamiliar with the archaeological evidence deployed in support of orthodoxy, but Denham’s summary of local innovations in cultivation, and theoretical discussion of potentially equifinal causes of spatial patterns in the archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, provides a thought-provoking counterpoint. A later chapter by Pawley on the use of historical linguistics to address population relationships is the main explication here of the alternative view that patterns of migration and interaction rather than diffusion are responsible for linguistic, archaeological and genetic patterns.
In wider Pacific archaeology this debate finds its clearest expression in different models for the origins of an archaeological horizon known as Lapita – characterised by the arrival of pottery in the archaeological record, and population expansion into the remote Pacific as far as Tonga and Samoa. Terrell in Chapter 6 ostensibly covers this important period, but is more concerned with epistemological issues than providing an up-to-date summary of the evidence. His argument that our interpretations of history are coloured by prior assumptions (‘baseline probabilities’) is well accepted if seldom overcome, but the scenario for Lapita that he proposes differs from standard models only in terms of its scale and makes little reference to the archaeological record.
After a useful stock-take of the radiocarbon chronology of colonisation across the whole region (Reith and Cochrane, Chapter 7), the book moves swiftly eastward. Individual chapters summarise the archaeology of each major archipelago as defined by modern national boundaries. In several of these locations our understanding of the archaeological record has changed rapidly in recent years due to increased fieldwork and innovations in methodology. Vanuatu stands out as a good example of an island group where recent intensive work by a small group of researchers has located numerous new sites, and revealed important complexities in processes of colonisation, interaction and cultural diversification, as summarised by Bedford and Spriggs (Chapter 8). But, as they note, for many locations in the western Pacific knowledge is biased towards the early record and more work needs to be done connecting early sites to subsequent changes and the emergence of modern sociocultural forms. In Fiji, Tonga and Samoa this comparative lack of later evidence has provoked debate about processes of cultural transformation. Cochrane’s chapter on Fiji makes a case for the refinement of archaeological theory to better differentiate between alternative explanations.
Elsewhere, in the more recently settled regions of East Polynesia and parts of Micronesia, archaeologists have developed relatively detailed sequences of sociocultural transformation. Sections in following chapters on Palau, Yap, Pohnpei, central East Polynesia, Hawaii, Rapa Nui and New Zealand all cover drivers of change post-colonisation. There is a recurring theme of interactions between environmental productivity, population growth, intensification of production and resource conflict, prompting different responses in social organisation and emerging hierarchy and inequality. Rapa Nui (Easter Island), whose famous statuary graces the cover of the book, epitomises the way archaeologists and other social theorists have utilised Pacific Island exemplars in debates about these issues. Hunt and Lipo (Chapter 19) critique earlier neo-Malthussian allegories that posited the island’s population outgrew its resources, burning through a productive environment in pursuit of monumental aggrandisements, before collapsing into warring bands of survivors. They point out large evidential gaps in this model, and propose that, rather than collapse, the population developed sustainable strategies for survival in an always resource poor environment. Their explanation for the massive statues is a Hobbesian retort to Malthus: they were a form of ‘costly signalling’ that mitigated violent competition – veritable Leviathans promoting the benefits of group membership and collective projects for long-term survival.
Enlightenment-era obsessions clearly still haunt Oceanic archaeology, but what about indigenous perspectives on the past? Christophe Sand (Chapter 9), in his summary of New Caledonia, provides an important discussion of how modern archaeology in the Pacific exists in dialogue with other ways of knowing and constructing the past, local political and economic concerns in developing post-colonial nations, and its own at times problematic history. But, for now at least, this dialogue has not dramatically reshaped archaeological enquiry in the region. Nevertheless, the variety of issues and perspectives covered in this book is impressive, and it is perhaps testament to the vibrancy of archaeology in Oceania that coverage is not able to be entirely comprehensive. It is an excellent introduction to contemporary research in the region and will serve as a useful reference text for students, teachers and others with an interest in the long-term history of the Pacific.
