This book was referenced in Nicholas Thomas' Voyagers as a more comprehensive discussion of the history of the settlement of the Pacific Islands, and it is that.
Kirch cites a lot research, including some of his own, working from as far back as they can manage - at least 40,000 years ago for the initial human arrival in the Papua New Guinea/Bismarck Archipelago region - up to the time of European contact. He splits the book into broad geographic regions - Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia - then dives into the existing evidence for habitation, cultural changes, agricultural practices, trade relations. Basically anything and everything they had evidence or research for (as of ~25 years ago, when the book was published.)
One of the fascinating aspects of the book, beyond all the actual information, is how they get that information from different disciplines to flesh out their understanding. Comparing not only changes in the pottery they find or similarities between languages, but also looking at the ancestral forms of different languages to see what terms or concepts they had words for. If they have a word for "outrigger", well, that tells you something about the kinds of boats they had. If a particular island or people have a lot of words for "kinship" or "clan", it might tell you something about how their society was organized.
On a different front, pollen records or animal remains can show when species that weren't native to a particular island, like taro or Pacific rats, first appear on that island. Because there's a decent chance they were brought there (or stowed away) on human vessels. Or, make inferences based on when certain native plants or animals stop showing up in pollen or bone remains, because the new inhabitants probably wiped them out with overhunting, excess burn regimes, or poor soil conservation practices. It's heartening on some level to know it's not just white people who fuck up nature.
Kirch is also open about where the gaps exist. Not only just islands that hadn't really been surveyed very much, but the areas of inquiry that were going to need new information or new techniques to tease out. There's still a lot in here. A brief section about navigation, and how the Polynesians were able to combine knowing latitude with knowing the prevailing wind currents to seek out new islands. Kirch discusses how a lot of islands gradually simplify their pottery designs away from dentate markings of the Lapita pottery, and in some cases ultimately discard pottery altogether. Critically, though it takes him a while to do it, he explains why they would discard pottery (wood bowls last longer and are better for cooking over earth ovens), which I was wondering about after the first time he mentioned it.
He discusses how malaria may have played a role in why communities in Melanesia rarely reached the same densities or total populations as those in Polynesia, where the mosquitos didn't exist. There's comparisons of societies run based on heredity versus those based more on actual deeds, and why an island might go one way or the other. To be sure, some of that's conjecture, but it's still nice to learn about the hypotheses.
I do wonder, as I usually do after reading an older book like this, how much new knowledge has come to light since this was published. Voyagers listed later dates for dispersal to the more distant Polynesian islands than Kirch does. In some cases, Kirch is talking about people having reached New Zealand or Hawaii or Rapa Nui 300-500 years earlier than what Thomas mentioned. So I don't know if there's new data, or the old data was tested again, but it keeps me curious.
'More than anywhere else within island Melanesia, the stylistic differentiation of New Caldonian pottery parallels the differentiation of its ethno-linguistic groups. Indeed, it seems likely that ceramics, as well as other forms of material culture, were actively manipulated by local peoples as symbols of ethnic identity.'
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