My relationship with the sea is sitting on a seawall and looking out across the grey waters of the English Channel or North Sea and eating fish and chips. Perhaps it is a bit more than that since the sounds of the sea were the sounds of my childhood, having lived at various times on the south coast of England, sometimes little more than a pebble's throw from the sea. But that is as far as my relationship with it goes; I have never really known the sea, and certainly not in the manner outlined in the volume under review here. I am not a sailor or a fisherman; I have never been seal clubbing or harpooned a whale. I doubt many archaeologists have. The sea has always drawn people to it though, and had a primary and essential role to many societies through time. For that reason it is necessary for archaeologists to attempt to comprehend the full spectrum of past relationships with the seascape, even if we may have lost something of that deep and intense relationship ourselves. As Bjerck and Zangrando point out in the opening chapter of this volume, the seascape is different from any other ‘scape’, with its own distinct artefacts, technologies, character, rhythms, and ways of being. Archaeology is often served well by saltwater—we are terrestrial creatures and so are dependent on ‘things’ for sea travel and exploitation, whether fish hooks and harpoons or boats and paddles. We also have good evidence for sea-level rises and falls, submerging coastal areas or raising shorelines. Archaeology is well placed to study human-sea relations.

Marine Ventures seeks to understand past human relationships with the sea, from the Late Pleistocene to historic times, although it has a particular emphasis on the Mesolithic period. The volume is predominantly made up of papers presented at the 2013 Marine Ventures International Symposium in Trondheim (Norway), which developed from a research project to look at early human approaches to the seascapes of Norway and Tierra del Fuego in South America. As a result, just over half of the twenty-five peer-reviewed papers in this volume are focused on coastal hunter-gatherer groups in one or both of these places. Additional papers discuss coastal groups from elsewhere, and sometimes from other periods, giving the volume a good international scope.

The volume is split into three sections, ‘Beginnings’, ‘Lifestyles’, and ‘Seafaring’, although why some chapters ended up in one section rather than another is not particularly clear, and I find it easier to discuss the chapters geographically. Four chapters focus specifically on comparing the evidence for Mesolithic groups in Norway with coastal groups in Tierra del Fuego. These are written by the editors of the volume, having derived from their research project, and deal with various elements associated with marine foragers, such as social complexity (Ch. 8, by Zangrando et al.), and settlement patterns (Ch. 11, by Fretheim et al.). Chapter 5 (by Breivik et al.) makes the point that most hunter-gatherer models are based on terrestrial groups and are not necessarily applicable to boat-using marine foragers, while a different tone is taken in Chapter 4 (by Bjerck et al.), which compares the exploitation of seals in Scandinavia with that in Patagonia. Reading this enlightening chapter made me realize how little I knew about pinnipeds—seals, sea lions, and walruses—from their habitat and diet to their physiology and remarkable swimming abilities. Although it is by no means an original approach in comparing the European Mesolithic with hunter-gatherer groups from Tierra del Fuego, these comparative chapters are interesting and usefully highlight how superficially similar patterns can arise from very different practices and processes. They also serve to show that there is no linear evolution from simple to complex or mobile to sedentary; change is not unidirectional—groups can become, for example, both more and less mobile.

In Chapter 22, a further chapter deriving from the Marine Ventures research project, Husøy and Swensen provide another fascinating discussion—this time of the intriguing Yamana-English Dictionary which was compiled in the late nineteenth century. The Yamana people of Tierra del Fuego have been described ethnographically and archaeologically, but the dictionary adds a new source to our understanding of them, highlighting the importance of words relating to fishing and gathering.

The other chapters in the volume add to and extend the ideas of the Marine Ventures research project. Two chapters focus solely on the archaeology of Tierra del Fuego, synthesising archaeological research on the Chilean Pacific coast (Ch. 9, by Reyes et al.) and in southernmost Patagonia (Ch. 10, by Román et al.), while four chapters are dedicated to Mesolithic sites in Norway, and use a range of evidence for coastal adaptations, from isotopic (Ch. 14, by Skar et al.) to lithic raw material (Ch. 23, by Nielson et al.) and mobility and settlement patterns (Ch. 3, by Bergsvik et al., and Ch. 16, by Solheim & Persson). In another (Ch. 7), Woodman focuses on pioneering migrations into new lands by comparing the expansion of groups entering Ireland with those in Arctic Norway, suggesting that the movement of people was not an event but a series of processes.

Gjerde explores depictions of boats in Fennoscandian prehistoric rock art in Chapter 21, which include astonishing scenes of halibut fishing, reindeer driving, and seal and whale hunting, representing, according to the author, an intertwining of both real and cosmological events. Interaction with and across the Baltic Sea in the Bronze Age is the focus of a paper by Sperling (Ch. 25), who outlines cultural contacts evidenced by the movement of metalwork, but argues that metalwork is not the primary source of cultural contact and needs to be complemented with evidence from other sources and with other perspectives (such as the symbolic and socio-cultural). Departing from the prehistoric focus, Sørheim looks at twelfth century fishing in Norway (Ch. 17), particularly the large-scale trade in dried cod known as ‘stockfish’ which was exported around Europe. The development of this new commercial profession led to new settlement along the outmost coast of Norway.

Broadening the range of papers from Scandinavia and Patagonia (but bringing us back to hunter-gatherers), two chapters deal with Spain and Portugal. Álvarez-Fernández reports on the Pleistocene and early Holocene marine faunal assemblage from La Garma—a remarkable site with ten caves and an open area site (Ch. 2), while Soares provides a synthesis of Mesolithic activity along the Sado river in Portugal (Ch. 15). Chapter 12 takes us further afield with Harmsen and Karunaratne reporting on a project in Sri Lanka cataloguing hunter-gatherer sites along the coast spanning the middle to late Holocene, highlighting how natural disasters, such as tsunamis, are historically conditioned by the interplay between human and environmental systems.

Moving across to North America, Erlandson discusses in Chapter 20 the effects of post-glacial sea level rise and seafaring on California's Channel Islands—Santarosae in particular—highlighting how changes in size and conformation of islands will have affected the logistics of boat travel; while maritime adaptations along the Central Pacific coast of Canada—the Hakai Passage—are discussed by Fedje and McLaren in Chapter 6.

The four final chapters discussed here focus specifically on the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of North America. These range from a study of the impacts and significance of sea ice, which is a crucial medium for travel and subsistence, highlighting people's deep awareness of it (Ch. 13, by Rogers), to an article on indigenous sailing; knowledge of which may or may not have been introduced by Europeans (Ch. 18, by Anichtchenko). The sail implies the possibility of long-distance voyaging and therefore clearly a major factor in the large-scale movement of people, commodities, and ideas. The Vikings had arrived in this area by 1000 ad, and by the late fifteenth century the search for the Northwest Passage along with an increase in cod fishing brought progressively more traffic. During the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries French and Basque fishermen and whaling crews were seasonally drawn to the beaches of southern Labrador, Canada, to harvest the ample whale and cod stocks found in its waters, returning to their homes with their preserved catch for the markets. The seasonal appearance of Europeans attracted Inuit groups and trading (as well as raiding) became common. This intersection of two maritime-focused groups lies at the heart of a pair of excellent chapters by Crompton and Rankin (Chs 19 and 24). What started as opportunistic soon became worked into the Inuit seasonal round, and European commodities were integrated into Inuit communities in ways that were informed by past traditions, but re-imagined for new circumstances. These four ‘Arctic’ chapters are terrific, and for me get to the nub of human-sea relations—perhaps because the archaeological evidence could be added to by historic and ethnographic sources.

Taking the volume as a whole, these papers highlight the huge diversity of relationships people have, and have had, with the marine environment; from total dominance to sporadic use, and from the coast to the open sea. This good quality and indexed hardback contains a huge amount of information from a very diverse set of sources, and for that the editors should be congratulated. Unfortunately the huge cover price, no fault of the editors, means that few but institutional libraries will buy it. The papers are wide ranging and consider a scope of topics from shellfish foraging and marine mammal hunting to seafaring. As with most edited volumes, they are also very variable in terms of their content and the way they have been written—some papers take a detailed site report approach, while others are of a more general narrative nature. With such a mix of papers, authors, styles, and subjects this is not an easy volume to review and inevitably there are some good papers and some less so. One thing that a multi-period book like this makes clear, though, is quite how stuck we still are as a discipline with period-specific interpretations and vocabularies. Just as the Bronze Age is often described in terms of its ‘cultural contacts’, interpretations of the Mesolithic period frequently focus around discussions of ‘adaptive strategies’ and ‘mobility’. In fact, a few of the ‘Mesolithic’ chapters carry more than a whiff of processual archaeology about them, so that salmon are reduced to ‘focal resources’ (Ch. 8, p. 134), and couples to ‘reproductive relationships’ (Ch. 8, p. 134) or ‘conjugal pairs’ (Ch. 3, p. 34). At times a macho, hunting world is conjured in which task groups are made up of ‘able-bodied men’ (Ch. 3, p. 34), and sites may have been ‘used by young men (and women for that matter)’ (Ch. 3, p. 49). Thanks for the afterthought! Archaeology, and Mesolithic studies, have moved on a long way from these terms of reference and many innovative studies, some well over a decade old now, are available (for example, papers in Conneller, Reference Conneller2000; Bevan & Moore, Reference Bevan and Moore2003; Milner & Woodman, Reference Milner and Woodman2005; Conneller & Warren, Reference Conneller and Warren2006). Robert Van de Noort's theoretically informed North Sea Archaeologies (Reference Van de Noort2011) is another oversight—not once referenced within the volume. But that is not to tar every paper with the same brush, or indeed every section of the chapters just mentioned, which make otherwise excellent points, and many papers in this collection present interesting, nuanced studies of the way people have engaged with the sea in the past.

Aside from, say, fishermen, sailors, and marine archaeologists, few people nowadays have a truly intimate relationship with the sea. Few appreciate the vastness of the open ocean, with most, like me, experiencing it from the coastline. Nevertheless, the sea has always held a fascination for people—pulling us to it and pushing us away like a tide. It is a vast economic resource, a contradictory place of plenty, but also of loss where countless lives have been taken. Light, exciting, and freedom-giving, as well as dark, dangerous, and foreboding, it is an enabler of movement as well as a boundary. That paradox forms part of our collective relation with the sea, and this book goes some way to providing an archaeological perspective on it.