Book reviews Peter S. Bellwood. First islanders: prehistory and human migration in Island Southeast Asia. 2017. Hoboken (NJ): Wiley Blackwell; 978-1-119-25154- 5 £60. This book is a synthesis of the archaeology of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) from within the view that human population and cultural movement is a central explanatory dynamic to societal change across time. No student of ISEA and Pacific archaeology is unfamiliar with the scholarship of Peter Bellwood. He is a synthesiser of the region’s archaeology, inter- ested, as he mentions in the book, in both the macro and micro narratives, and combining multidis- ciplinary approaches (p. 351). One may disagree with him at certain levels and particular details, but no one amongst the active researchers in the region can match Bellwood’s depth and breadth of knowledge of the literature. This book succeeds the Prehistory of the Indo- Malaysian archipelago (1985) and is the latest addition in a series of Wiley Blackwell books that give a plat- form to Bellwood’s macro ideas. The first book, First farmers (2005), explains the origins of agricul- tural societies across the globe, and was followed by First migrants (2013), which presents ancient migra- tions in a global perspective. This latest book homes-in on Southeast Asia, the core research region for Bellwood’s academic contribution to world archae- ology. It is a text for academics interested in the deep history of the region; indeed, human ancestries and population migration patterns in deep history is what excites Bellwood as a scholar (p. 2). Bellwood’s treatise is divided into 10 chapters, with the contribu- tion of colleagues spread out from Chapter 3. An effective index section was also provided. The short first chapter explains the rationale of the work and defines terms and conventions used in the book, e.g. geographic coverage/definitions and how he applies a modified three-age periodisation—the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Para-Neolithic, Early Metal Age and Early Historical. The next two chapters summarise the latest informa- tion and views on the formation of the landscape of ISEA. This serves as backdrop for a synthesis of what we know of the migration to the region by Homininae and Homo sapiens. Inserted at the end of Chapter 3 is Colin Groves’s invited perspective that focuses on the dating and morphological study of Homo erectus from Java, and that argues against the evolution of Homo sapiens from this species. This is followed by Debbie Argue’s contribution, describing morphological studies of the remains of Homo flore- siensis. She supports the dominant position, namely that it is indeed a different species, while maintaining that there is still room for discussion on the phylogeny of these finds. Chapters 4–5 cover the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, or the period before what is considered to be the ‘Neolithic’ in ISEA. Bellwood very capably synthesises the latest information on the archaeology of ISEA for this time period, presenting a picture of a region that was unlike the adjunct areas, especially New Guinea. Within these two chapters are three con- tributions that buttress the argument for movements not only of human populations, but also of other eco- logical elements in a biogeographic framework. The invited perspective of Matsumura et al. discusses the human biological history of Mainland and ISEA, based chiefly on human remains from Late Pleistocene and Holocene cemetery sites. It provides a very important and useful summary table of relevant sites and finds, and, more importantly for Bellwood, cranial data supporting the movement of people in Southeast Asia, thus supporting the main argument of the book. This is also the case for the population genetics data provided by Cox in her take on the genetic history of human populations in the same time period. The following chapter discusses the archaeological data on the Late Palaeolithic in the region, with a contribu- tion from Philip J. Piper on the changing patterns of hunting across ISEA from 45–4.5 kya, or before the Neolithic; he uses zooarchaeological data and evidence of bone modifications to argue that there is still very weak evidence for the translocation of animals across the region at this time, which supports the hypothesis of the book that such human behaviour is strongly demonstrated only during the region’s Neolithic, when Austronesian populations and cultures spread. © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2018 antiquity 92 366 (2018): 1680–1692 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.239 1680