Scholarly books on the history of human–environmental relationships in the Galápagos Islands since the sixteenth century are rare, and it is pleasing to be able to welcome this one, which measures, as its subtitle states, the legacy of human occupation. It is a small book and more focused than its title suggests, but it is well written and illustrated, and it makes a valuable case in considering larger issues of ecological transformation.

The two introductory chapters provide a good narrative summary of human history, the introduction of foreign plants and animals, and some consequences for Galápagos landscapes and ecologies. There are also comments, mostly related to modern changes, in the concluding chapter, and it is worth mentioning the extensive notes and references. Nevertheless, the main part of the book is devoted much less to historical ecology and archaeology in the Galápagos Islands generally than to a particular case study of the impact of intensive commercial activity on Galápagos history and ecology. It is mainly about the Hacienda El Progreso of San Cristóbal Island, and the story is both colorful and instructive.

Manuel Julián Cobos was a freebooting capitalist from coastal Ecuador who organized the export from San Cristóbal to Central America in the 1860s of cattle hides, salted meat, sea lion skins, and the much-valued orchilla lichen, used to make purple dye. Charges of cattle rustling and smuggling sent Cobos and his 300 followers to Mexico, with similar results, and then to San Cristóbal where a sugar plantation was established in 1875. This developed into an extensive operation covering about 25,000 ha of western San Cristóbal. By the early twentieth century Hacienda El Progreso was producing 500 tons of sugar per year and had 100,000 coffee bushes, extensive market gardens, and large herds of cattle and horses, plus pigs, goats, and sheep. In addition, Cobos exploited the feral cattle elsewhere on San Cristóbal and on Floreana Island, and he extracted whale, sea lion, and tortoise oil. There were two boats for transport of goods to and from the mainland.

Several hundred people, of which men outnumbered women by four to one, were needed to run Hacienda El Progreso. They were mostly criminals or exiles and were effectively held in bondage and treated brutally by Cobos. Eventually he was attacked and killed by his workers, but not until 1904. The story is a large version of many smaller and similar cases of colonization in the Galápagos Islands, not least those of the Ritters, who landed from the Manuel y Cobos, no less, on Floreana Island in 1929 (Treherne, The Galapagos Affair, 1983)—but it would need a Joseph Conrad to do justice to the Hacienda El Progreso story.

After the death of Cobos, the estate declined through several ownerships into a small village until, in a fitting finale, it was selected for the speculative establishment of “a model community on a beautiful Pacific Island” (p. 63). This attracted more than 100 investors, of whom 30 arrived in 1960. The venture failed almost immediately, and only one colonist was left by 1961. Hacienda El Progreso's rapid rise, collapse through catastrophic management, and decline into near-extinction form a model of a colonization trajectory to set beside many another, from Norse Greenland, through Pitcairn Island, to Roanoke and Darien, to note just a few examples.

From an interesting history, the book turns to archaeological investigations at Hacienda El Progreso, conducted from 2014 to 2018, which were designed to “explore the spatial and temporal depth of human ecological transformation on San Cristóbal Island, and to elucidate the complex and historically contingent development of its novel anthropogenic ecosystem through the lens of historical and archaeological data” (p. 67). The archaeological data, however, are relatively few and unsurprising and do not add substantially to the abundant historical evidence, including images, of the Hacienda structures. The zooarchaeological data are also unremarkable. Shellfish remains are dominated by the giant chiton, as they are elsewhere on historical sites in the Galápagos. The fish remains are not identified below the family level. Cattle remains dominate mammalian bone. It is, of course, necessary to do the archaeology to derive such conclusions, but here, as so often in historical archaeology, the results do little more than confirm the historical data. It is the same with the archaeobotanical remains. Again, the research needed to be done, but it does not add anything significant to the historical evidence. There is more of interest in the material culture, notably of the fine ceramics and other luxury goods that are discussed in more detail. Yet, it is worth noting, as the authors do, that a coarse earthenware bottle of Chimú-Sican provenance from the nineteenth-century midden is consistent with evidence elsewhere in the Galápagos—indicating that such artifacts of possible precolumbian manufacture were taken to the islands only after European discovery (Anderson et al., Latin American Antiquity 27:169–183).

Overall, the main drawback of this book is that the archaeology, which occupies most of the book, was unable to add conspicuous value to the case of Hacienda El Progreso. It was too limited by the very young and narrow age of the sites and the abundant archival record. In archaeological terms, the objective of exploring spatial and temporal depth had hardly anything to work with. Even so, it is good to have this particular case published, and it is to be hoped that there will be much more research on the archaeology of the Galápagos Islands. Because the archaeology is so relatively young and, on the whole, well preserved, at least in the dry coastal areas, and because the Galápagos ecosystems are so interesting and long studied, there is an opportunity to investigate, in considerable depth, the history of cultural–natural interactions on an isolated archipelago in a way envisaged and advocated by Fosberg (Man's Place in the Island Ecosystem, 1963); for example, as a benchmark for similar studies in less favorable circumstances.