On the Margins of Sustainability, Prehistoric Settlement of Utrok Atoll, Northern Marshall Islands.(Book Review)

On the Margins of Sustainability, Prehistoric Settlement of Utrok Atoll, Northern Marshall Islands. Marshall I. Weisler. BAR International Series 967, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2001. xiii + 144 pp., illustrations, maps, bibliography, appendices. $42.00. ISBN 1-84171-254-X.

On the Margins of Sustainability is a well-produced and important addition to the growing literature on the archaeology of small tropical coral islands. The new facts, collected systematically and reported in considerable detail, are especially welcome given the general paucity of published information on Micronesian archaeology. (The work could have used a thorough copy editing to catch the typos and verb/ person mismatches, however.) In eight chapters and three appendices, and illustrated with numerous maps, drawings, and black and white photographs by the author, the monograph reports the results of surveys and excavations conducted by Weisler and Marshallese colleagues in seven islets of Utrok Atoll in the northern Marshalls. The Utrok research is part of a more comprehensive project of archaeological documentation instigated by the author some ten years ago. This project has included surveys and excavations at Epoon, Wujae, and Maloelap Atolls in addition to Utrok. Students at the University of Otago participated in the initial processing and subsequent laboratory analyses of the data, resulting so far in three Master's theses, the present report, and publications elsewhere by Weisler.

The fieldwork at Utrok Atoll was carried out when Weisler was Chief Archaeologist for the Republic of the Marshall Islands from 1993-1995 and subsequently. From having lived in the islands for several years, as well as having worked in a variety of settings in the tropical Pacific, he has become attuned to the ethnographic and geographic realities of small islands. For example his comments about current fishing practices and their relation to marine habitat attributes and current Marshallese subsistence options enhance the exposition beyond what researchers with less experience and cultural sensitivity might have produced.

The "long-term goal" of the project to which the Utrok results contribute is, "to understand the regional variation of Marshall Islands archaeology and to provide a basic culture-history for the archipelago" (p. xi). Weisler suggests that a key factor conditioning regional …