BOOK REVIEWS

book on historical geography as a general-ist. He is not averse to making superwaves out of specialists ' findings in putting forth his grand theory of prehistory with a Southeast Asian focus. As he sees it, his views are akin to those of Wilhelm Sol-heim and William Meachem, not those of Peter Bellwood (see references in Bellwood 1997). To take an academic approach, one might ask what problem the author set out to solve and what are his methodology, his results, and his conclusion. The problem he discusses is the postglacial inundation of the Sunda Shelf and its consequences. As his tale unfolds, he hypothesizes that a rise in sea level and, indeed, "floods, " on the shelf after the last glacial maximum led South-east Asians to disperse by sea and land to as far away as Mesopotamia, if not farther. To support his idea he considers archaeologi-cal, linguistic, genetic, and artistic informa-tion, as well as personal travel notes. He finds among the various specialist disci-plines tessera here and there and fits them into his mosaic picture of postglacial Southeast Asia. We hear little about pieces that do not fit his model well, though some pieces that were used fit better than others. The loose fitters may fall out of the picture as more information is considered or comes to light. Important parts of this model are pre-sented in the first half of the book. First, Sundaland was flooded in three surges be