Oceania (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (240 Records)
Identifying the material expressions of torture, punishment, discipline, and imprisonment are key factors in addressing the ways in which society exerts its control over the individual; particularly the non-conformist, the criminal, and the slave. With respect to the spatial expression of coerced labour control, the emphasis has been upon the idea of the "panoptican" or the mechanism by which the labourer can never know if he is being watched. Another form of coerced labour management though, is...
Is that Roo on the Barbeque? Using Use-Wear, Residue Analysis and Biochemical Staining to identify varied subsistence practices in Aboriginal archaeological sites in Australia. (2017)
Environmental factors associated with open context sites are frequently considered to negatively impact on the survival of archaeological residues on lithic artefacts. This report challenges these views and documents how the simple combination of three lines of evidence enabled the identification and characterisation of significant and varied subsistence practises from two sites on opposite sides of Australia. The identification of use-related residues was facilitated by using a specifically...
It’s all a bit retro: Investigating early phase rock art on the Dampier Archipelago, Northwest Australia. (2017)
Murujuga, located off the northwest coast of Australia, possesses one of the largest and most vibrant open air rock art galleries on the planet. On Murujuga, low erosion rates, durable geology, and growing evidence from the wider region has allowed for archaeological contextualization of rock art into deep time; giving researchers the opportunity to investigate both the changing social dynamics of groups and the stimuli for this change over thousands of years. The main objective of this paper is...
A Kangaroo Hunt (2015)
O’Connell is best known for championing an approach to exploring the evolution of human behavior and its attendant archaeological patterns through the distinctive lens of human behavioral ecology. His contributions in developing ways to operationalize theory for generating testable hypotheses about big questions in the human experience have indelibly shifted the trajectory of empirically bent studies of subsistence. However, far less appreciated are his keen ethnographic descriptions of the...
Knotless Netting in America and Oceania (1930)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The Kwajalein MIA Project (2017)
Kwajalein Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands, is located in the western Pacific, ~2,100 miles southwest of Hawai'i and is home to U.S. Army Garrison Kwajalein Atoll. During WWII, it was the site of Operation Flintlock and major bombing operations in the Pacific Theater. The Kwajalein MIA Project (KMP) is a public archaeology project dedicated to identifying aircraft and wreckage in the atoll lagoon that are linked to missing U.S. servicemen from WWII. The project is comprised of an...
The Landscape of Agricultural Engineering in Windward Kohala, Hawaii Island (2015)
The Hawaiian Islands are known for extensive irrigation complexes that covered coastal areas of large valleys and were recognized for their high productivity. Hawaii Island, however, had limited areas devoted to irrigated cultivation. In the study area of windward Kohala with its narrow valleys and moderately sloping ridges, the landscape for irrigated farming presented challenges that our work explores. Between AD 1300 and 1850 dispersed fields were established as much as 5-10 km inland within...
Lapita - the Australian connection (2015)
Recent research in southern New Guinea, Torres Strait and northeastern Australia suggests that Lapita users and possibly makers may have been present in regions hitherto believed to be beyond their reach. In New Guinea, the discovery of late Lapita near Port Moresby has just been complemented by findings of late Lapita ceramics in the western Gulf of Papua. Southwest of the Gulf, undiagnostic ceramics dating to perhaps 2500 years are now known in the Torres Strait. Bill Dickinson showed that...
The Lapita Design System: Its Analysis and Some of the Results (1989)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Late Holocene Human Expansion into Near and Remote Oceania: A Bayesian Model-Based Comparison of the Chronologies of the Mariana Islands and Lapita Settlement (2016)
Carson and colleagues have argued that the settlement of the Mariana Islands ~3500 cal BP marks the first major human expansion in the Western Pacific during the late Holocene. If this settlement date is correct, it would be the initial population movement beyond the Near Oceania and Island Southeast Asia region, an area occupied by modern humans for 40,000+ years. The previous consensus gave precedence to the rapid Lapita expansion throughout Near Oceania at generally the same time, followed a...
Layer Upon Layer Upon Layer – Interpreting the Historic Shipwreck Sites of Kenn Reefs, Coral Sea, through GIS (2018)
In 2017, maritime archaeologists from the Silentworld Foundation and Australian National Maritime Museum conducted a survey of historic shipwreck sites at Kenn Reefs, Australian Coral Sea Territory. The acquired data was utilised to build a comprehensive Geographic Information System (GIS) project. Maritime archaeology was born of, and is continually improved by, technological advances. GIS has become yet another indispensible tool to the modern maritime archaeologist - integrating data ranging...
Let the Memory Live Again: Creation and Recreation of Hawaiian Households (2016)
Investigating the use of memory allows for an increased understanding of how historical knowledge is used in the reproduction of social actions in the past and production of knowledge in the present. This paper analyzes the importance of memory in Hawaiian culture and academic literature. Many archaeological analyses of pre-European contact Hawaiian households are predicated on the writings of 19th century ethnohistorians (among others) that recorded Hawaiian oral traditions. The act of...
Light islands in a sea of dark rainforest: Human influence on fire, climate and biodiversity in the Australian tropics (2016)
The use of fire in Australian Aboriginal society has been well documented and has been pivotal to arguments about human impact on the Australian biota. Continuous and well-dated palaeoecological sequences from the humid rainforests of NE Queensland are beginning to reveal detailed records of vegetation transformation and shifting fire regimes within rainforest environments. The archaeological record is also providing new insights into plant exploitation and adaptation strategies to enable people...
Local Contexts, Global Application - A Comparative Analysis of Collaborative and Community Archaeology Projects in Western Australia, British Columbia and Alaska. (2015)
Collaborative heritage management projects requires adaptation to local customary protocols, local structures, and local community goals, and so necessitates a uniquely, localized focus. At the same time, developing, formalized approaches to collaboration that have universal elements – structures and processes - that are applicable in any context, is a goal in the continual evolution and development of a fully integrated collaborative, community archaeology. This means identifying those...
Madness, Architecture and Constraint: The role of the built environment in the mental institutions of New South Wales (2013)
The mental asylums of the nineteenth century, influenced by the concepts of moral therapy and non-restraint, were intended to be curative environments capable of reforming the mad. The architecture and built environment of these institutions was in essence the treatment, making the asylums both highly ideological and also inextricably physical. Through a comparative analysis of four such institutions in New South Wales, this paper will examine the tensions between the social and material...
Managing Cultural Resources within Protected Areas (2017)
A goal for cultural heritage management is to advance the comprehensive preservation, conservation and management of cultural resources, defined as the broad array of stories, knowledge, people, places, structures, objects, and the associated environment that contribute to the maintenance of cultural identity and/or reveal the prehistoric, historic and contemporary human interactions with an ecosystem. Involving the state and local community in regular management, activities, and projects should...
Mapping Evolutionary Histories of Oceanic Mythology: Can Phylogenic Methods Applied to Creation Myths Increase Our Understanding of Prehistoric Migrations? (2017)
This study seeks to understand the means of dissemination of oral cultural traditions of Oceania across time and geographic space. I hypothesize evolutionary trees produced from analysis of creation myths provide a means to infer prehistoric migrations routes. Additionally, creation myths and language have parallel evolutionary history and form a combined set of core cultural traditions. In order to test these hypotheses, creation myths, selected from the earliest recorded versions from Oceania,...
Mapping Island 'Moka': Assessing the Spatial Patterns of Customary Fishing Weirs in the Fiji Island Group (2017)
Customary Fijian fishing weirs, known locally as 'moka', are an archaeological feature type that can be readily identified due to their large size, uniform shape, and conspicuous location on the tidal flats and shorelines of both high and low islands. Recent advances in remote sensing technology have allowed for an improved survey of Fijian fishing weirs adding to the existing inventory and informing upon early settlement patterns in the Fiji Island group. While 'moka' do not play a major part...
Marae of Tahiti, Society Islands (2015)
Since the pionneering studies of Kenneth Pike Emory in the begining of the 20th centyry, the ancient temples, marae, have been considered as good markers of social status, revealing the research focus on the complexification processes of polynesian societies. Despite the lack of substantial chronological data on marae of the island of Tahiti, crossing architectural components of marae with their spatial context and ethnohistoric sources, provided an evolutive spatial model that might be...
Marginalization of the Margins: The Importance of Smaller Islands in Human Prehistory (2015)
Across the world’s seas and oceans, archaeological research focused on islands has traditionally privileged those which are larger in size. Myriad reasons can explain this phenomenon, ranging from the (mis)perception by scholars that prehistoric peoples would have been attracted to the greater number and diversity of resources typically available on larger islands, to the ephemeral aspect of archaeological evidence on smaller land areas along with issues that archaeologists face in terms of...
Marking Presence, Passage and Place at the North Head Quarantine Station, Sydney (2013)
A slowly fading inscription, scored into a sandstone boulder at the North Head Quarantine Station, Sydney, records the names of three, or possibly four, people—John, Alice Oliver and George. Dated to July 1893 the inscription prompts immediate questions: who were John, Alice Oliver and George? Were they a family? Under what circumstances did they find themselves in quarantine? Where did they come from and how? Did they survive their time in quarantine, or is this a memorial to loved ones lost?...
Marquesan voyaging during the East Polynesian Archaic era (2015)
Early East Polynesian chiefdoms are remarkable for their voyaging spheres, as evidenced by archaeologically-documented interisland contact. One of the most prominent examples of interisland contact derives from a 1974 study by Bill Dickinson in which it was found that a handful of pottery sherds discovered in the Marquesas can be sourced to Fiji, an archipelago lying more than 4000 km to the west. Various interpretations of this discovery continue to fuel debate surrounding the context and...
Martu Ethnoarchaeology: Foraging, Site Structure and the Scales of Constraint on Human Behavior (2015)
In his watershed 1995 publication, O’Connell outlined the utility of approaching ethnoarchaeology through a general theory of behavior by noting the disparity between studies examining faunal remains and those attempting to explain site structure. While the former was finding great success by drawing on models from behavioral ecology, the later was stagnant and lacking a general theory of behavior. Drawing on ethnoarchaeological data collected with Martu Aboriginal foragers, we highlight a...
Measuring Human Impacts on Islands Relative to Size (2017)
Archaeological research on islands worldwide demonstrates that initial colonists exerted substantial environmental impacts on local ecologies, ranging from the extirpation of native species to landscape modification. The degree of impact was dependent on a host of variables, including the kinds and number of introduced plant and animal species, the remoteness of settled islands, and extent of interaction between discrete landmasses. Yet, there is still much to learn about the consequences of...
Measuring the Quality of Personal Goods: Antipodean Adventures in the Archaeology of Consumption (2018)
The systematic indexation of quality in mass-produced goods offers a new approach for historical archaeology and studies of consumption. The relative excellence of glass and ceramics sherds has proven to be a useful complement to traditional analyses of function, fabric and decoration when studying consumer choice at the household level. But does this approach suit the archaeological study of personal goods? Are the challenges of artifact preservation and assemblage diversification too great?...