Concentrating their attention on the Pacific Islands, the contributors to this book show how the tightly focused social and economic systems of islands offer archaeologists a series of unique opportunities for tracking and explaining prehistoric change. Over the last thirty years excavations in Fiji, the Marianas, and Hawai'i have revolutionised Oceanic archaeology and, as the major problems of cultural origins and island sequences have been resolved, archaeologists have come increasingly to study social change and to integrate newly acquired data on material culture with older ethnographic and ethnohistorical materials. The fascinating results of this work, centring on the evolution of complex Oceanic chiefdoms into something very much like classic 'archaic states', are authoritatively surveyed here for the first time. Read Less