Oceania (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Stantis. Hallie Buckley. Amy Commendador. John Dudgeon.

Though many ethnohistoric sources in the tropical Pacific recount chiefly feasting events, few describe the feeding practices of children despite the impact childhood nutrition has on morbidity and mortality throughout an individual’s life history. The Namu burial ground (circa 750 — 300 BP) on the island of Taumako in the southeast Solomon Islands provides a direct means of understanding prehistoric life on a Polynesian Outlier. Twenty individuals from the 226 excavated were sampled as part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Simon Holdaway. Patricia Fanning.

In Australia’s desert regions, different conceptual models are sometimes used to explain patterning in late Holocene surface deposits. Among these patterns are distributions of radiocarbon determinations, which have been concurrently explained as generated by intermittent occupation by hypermobile foragers, or growing semi-resident populations of broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers. This paper shows how models connected to the language and logic of record formation can help resolve competing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Lane.

Fortifications are found in the archaeological record around the world. Studies of fortifications on the landscape tend to focus on aspects of human territoriality, especially in relation to conflict, economics, and resources. This paper takes a Human Behavioral Ecology approach to territoriality and applies the use of viewsheds, as derived from a GIS database, to the examination of a central resource. Rapa, Austral Islands, French Polynesia, is often cited as a classic example of an island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Field.

The extinction of megafauna across the globe generates lively and sometimes heated discussion on timing and cause. In the case of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea), the debate is divided into two distinct camps – those that hold a firm belief that humans were responsible, and those that consider the current datasets to thin to provide any definitive answer. These big picture issues are reliant on the acquisition of data from individual sites and data on megafauna comes predominantly from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Dye. Timothy Rieth.

Archaeologists sometimes claim that the refined chronologies yielded by Bayesian calibration make it possible to distinguish between Levi-Strauss's "hot" and "cold" societies. Historians of Hawai`i leave little doubt that Hawai`i was a "hot" society in the early historic period. A review and comparison of chronologies for the tempo of change in pre-Contact Hawai`i distinguishes the "cold" society reconstituted by ad hoc methods from the "hot" society reconstituted by the Bayesian method. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Matisoo-Smith.

Recent reports of ancient DNA recovery from samples that are 10s if not 100s of thousands of years old attest to the amazing developments in aDNA technology in recent years. Unfortunately, most aDNA from the Pacific Islands is poorly preserved and highly degraded. Despite the relatively short history of settlement on many Pacific Islands, ancient DNA is often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain from archaeological samples recovered from Pacific sites. Still, we are able to recover aDNA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

Anthropological discussions of gender and sexuality in colonial-era Polynesia have often focused on the introduction of Western clothing styles and the relationship between changing modes of dress and the negotiation of new social identities. Because clothing is highly perishable, however, there have been few opportunities to address this topic through the archaeological record. My paper presents an analysis of an exceptionally well-preserved collection of archaeological cloth from Nu‘alolo Kai,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Miller.

Bone fragmentation is a potential issue for anyone who works with skeletal remains. If a bone is burned, or fragmented in a way that prevents morphological identification, it can be near impossible to identify which bone it is, or what taxa it belongs to. However, there are techniques for identifying bones based on their microstructure, as the microstructure of human and non-human bone has distinct differences. These differences allow for microscopic comparisons of bone cross-sections and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Popp. Jarman Jarman. Hilary Close. Thomas Larsen. Terry Hunt.

Archaeology and isotopic studies have demonstrated several examples of initial colonists of Pacific Islands subsisting mainly on terrestrial diets, with exotic domesticates preferred over local seafood. Seemingly a poor adaptation to remote island environments, this appears confusing from a behavioural ecology perspective. From a culture evolutionary viewpoint, however, this could demonstrate how intergenerational transmission of human behaviour may preserve dietary traditions in long-distance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian McNiven. John Bradley.

Archaeological approaches to stone-walled tidal fish traps of Indigenous Australians focus on the technology and subsistence, with chronological development linked to demands of increased food production associated with demographic change and social intensification. For the Yanyuwa ‘Saltwater People’ of tropical northern Australia, old stone-walled fish traps found within the intertidal zone are associated with the creative acts of ancestral spirit beings. As such, these fish traps are imbued...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Alderson.

In Oceania, archaeologists have examined perishable ethnographic items to gain fresh insights into past people’s identities. This paper presents a new analysis of 19th and 20th century Micronesian loincloths from European and American museums, explaining how their construction offers insights into islanders’ socio-political identities during a period of rapidly intensifying global interconnectivity. On the island Kosrae, Micronesia, tol (loincloths) were the primary garment of every polity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mick de Ruyter.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Contextualizing Maritime Archaeology in Australasia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1929, the steel-hulled barquentine Alexa was destroyed by fire while loading copra, a notoriously unstable cargo, in Butaritari, Kiribati. The ship was the last commercially operated square-rigged sailing vessel on Australian articles. The Dutch-built, Chinese-owned, New Zealand registered, multi-nationally crewed ship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Baker.

A central tenant of military philosophy is "adapt, improvise, and overcome". Navigating battlefields requires constant adaptation to dynamic surroundings due to the interplay of several variables such as 1) pre-existing landscape and terrain, 2) enemy defenses, 3) enemy opposing forces, and 4) friendly and enemy fire. To successfully navigate the archaeology of a historic or prehistoric battlefield, archaeologists must attempt to understand the variables (such as those listed) that contributed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fitzpatrick. Matthew Napolitano. Elliot Blair.

Glass beads have long played an important role in Micronesian societies. Oral histories and ethnographic accounts describe how clay and glass beads ("udoud") in Palau functioned as traditional forms of currency in exchange relationships and were apparently used by islanders from Yap several hundred miles away to negotiate access to limestone quarries that enabled them to carve their famous stone money disks ("rai"). Evidence shows that both stone money quarrying and the exchange of high-valued...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Fillios.

Most zooarchaeologists are familiar with the uncertain feeling when faced with identifying material in the absence of a physical comparative collection. In response to this challenge, numerous photographic atlases have been produced to provide researchers with access to collections while in the field. Unfortunately, 2D images are constrained by their inability to be ‘handled’ and measured in the same way as a physical specimen. The UNE Archaeology virtual bone project was initially developed as...