Taken together as an edited collection, these 14 chapters by 17 authors will serve for years to come as a thoughtful and instructive record of the current turn in local archaeological scholarship in Melanesia and Polynesia. Future generations writing about the past and the history of science in this part of the world will find what is available here truly helpful.

Tim Thomas writes in his introduction that “theory in archaeology is the means by which we interpret or explain observations garnered from the archaeological record” (p. 2). As someone who has been writing about the Pacific for more than half a century, however, I have never seen the role of theory simply as a handmaiden for the interpretation or explanation of something called “the archaeological record.”

Back in 1978, Jeffrey Clark and I proposed in “Archaeology in Oceania” (Annual Review of Anthropology 7:293–319) two alternative research strategies: (1) construct models plausibly accounting for what is already known about a particular historical problem that suggest how new archaeological research might narrow the field of possible explanations, or (2) model how new information could help us evaluate alternative explanations for what has happened in the past around the globe.

Notice that Clark and I used the word “explanation,” not “interpretation.” We acknowledged, however, that many archaeologists seemed to favor neither strategy. Instead, they

In his introduction, Thomas notes that geneticists today working with aDNA often seem unaware of the problematic history of theories about the peopling of the Pacific Islands, and that “archaeologists in the region have also only just begun to turn from mapping the origins of categorical populations to theorising the sociocultural processes by which people and things came to be distributed” (p. 24). Moreover, “master narratives” about the Pacific told by archaeologists, geneticists, and others have changed little despite decades of recent scholarship. As he writes, perhaps more often than not, “the story always ends up in the same place” (p. 25).

Although I agree with him, not all archaeologists in the Pacific today would. Nonetheless, archaeologists working elsewhere in the world—and particularly those who do not work on islands—have every right to ask, “Why should I care about the Pacific?”

In Chapter 2, Thomas Leppard and Scott Fitzpatrick discuss the impact Pacific archaeology has had on the study of islands elsewhere in the world. It seems likely, however, that many of the chapters in this collection, as good as most of them are, may only be helpful to archaeologists and others directly interested in the Pacific. Exceptions are Ethan Cochrane's commentary on the role of evolutionary theory in Pacific archaeology (Chapter 3); the concise and lucid analysis by Mark Golitko (Chapter 5) of how the farming-language dispersal hypothesis has been debated in the Pacific, and why—contrary to stereotypes of social life in New Guinea—if “complexity refers to dense interconnections between communities and individuals, then arguably the SW Pacific has been socially complex for at least the last 6,000 years” (pp. 110–111); the lengthy, nuanced, and fascinating review by Thomas (Chapter 7) looking at island colonization as “a long-term phenomenon encompassing most aspects of human-environment interactions” (p. 149); the challenge to dominant models of crop domestication provided by Tim Denham (Chapter 10) using archaeological and other data from New Guinea; and the insightful commentary by Peter Sheppard (Chapter 13), which acknowledges first that “with the coming of modern fieldwork and dating methods, Pacific archaeology developed an uneasy relationship with oral tradition and historical reconstructions dependent upon it” (p. 277) and then argues—rightfully, I think—that local islander understandings can genuinely help all of us gain better understandings of the past. Other chapters focus on topics such as Polynesian culture history, political economy, preceramic shellworking, indigenous theory, gender archaeology, monumental architecture, and anarchy theory.

Over 40 years ago, Clark and I were convinced that knowing the past in the Pacific could help archaeologists around the globe better understand what it means to be human. We still have this youthful outlook. This collection of essays confirms, however, that those of us working in this part of the world have a long way to voyage before we get there. Why? Because the word “theory” can mean anything from “I have a hunch” to E = mc². If this collection is representative, then what “theory” currently means in the Pacific remains closer to the “hunch” end of the spectrum than to Einstein's famous generalization. If so, archaeologists working in the Pacific need more theory than this collection documents, more alternative theories than this collection suggests, and altogether more willingness to use more formal strategies of theory modeling, hypothesis framing, and empirical evaluation.