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PACIFIC ISLAND LANDSCAPES. By Patrick D. Nunn. Suva (Fiji): Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. 1998. xiv, 318 pp. (B&W photos, maps, graphs, charts.) US$26.00, paper ISBN 982-02-01252.
LANDSCAPES are, and have been for some time now, the "in thing" for many historians, social geographers, archaeologists and art historians. Already in the final decade of the last century, Chris Gosden and Lesley Head ( 1994, Archaeology in Oceania 29:113-6) pointed out that it was a "usefully ambiguous concept." Patrick Nunn, as a geomorphologist/ physical geographer, is clearly frustrated by such ambiguities and sets out in this book, and much previous work, to provide an account of the bare bones of landscape, of the "natural" processes by which pieces of land (islands) came into being over millions of years and how such changes do not stop when humans arrive. Here begins the lesson, in that Nunn believes that we must understand...