Pacific Islands (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Flexner.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transformation of island environments and settlement patterns resulting from missionisation and Christian conversion is a well-developed theme in the historical archaeology of Oceania. The Mangareva Islands in French Polynesia provide an exemplary case study, featuring dozens of stone structures built by the Catholic Pères des Sacrés Cœurs beginning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Riordan. Julie Field.

This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of landscapes of movement establishes the theoretical basis for understanding meaning behind the creation and use of roads, trails, and pathways. This meaning can be categorized by "prioritized relationships" (i.e., social, political, religious, economic) which ultimately stimulate the existence of landscapes of movement. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rona Ikehara-Quebral. Judith McNeill. Michele Toomay Douglas. Michael Pietrusewsky.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural Resources Management studies in the Mariana Islands have consistently expanded opportunities for in-depth bioarchaeological research. Burial assemblages originating from historic preservation compliance obligations generally derive from one of three contexts: displaced fragmentary remains;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Prebble. Seth Quintus. Ethan Cochrane.

This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development and present nature of landscape archaeology in the Pacific owes much to the pioneering work of Janet Davidson and Roger Green in Falefa Valley, Upolu, Sāmoa. This research, completed in the absence of modern geospatial technology, not only demonstrated the potential of landscape-scale investigations in Polynesia but also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huebert. Melinda S. Allen.

Contact-period accounts point to considerable variability in Polynesian agronomic production systems. In the Marquesas Islands, a mountainous island group in the eastern Pacific, food production in the proto-historic period was narrowly focused on tree cropping and breadfruit cultivation in particular. Early western visitors remarked on the archipelago’s large and thriving island populations, and their stable and productive arboricultural systems. In this paper, we present the results of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trever Duarte. Jon Tulchin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thousands of charcoal specimens from 23 traditional Hawaiian sites throughout Ka’ūpūlehu Ahupua’a in north Kona were analyzed to see how kama’aina (“people of the land”) interacted with their environment. Fifty-one plant taxa, including 36 plants of Hawaiian origin and six Polynesian introductions, were identified. Combining charcoal identification and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Moragas. Sandra Montón-Subías. James Bayman.

This paper presents a new archaeological project that we are co-directing in Umatac, Guam. Combining historical written sources and archaeological information, we seek to contribute a better understanding of the historical-archaeological legacy connected to colonial processes related to the Hispanic Monarchy in the western Pacific, and their role in resulting ethnogenesis.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Klenck. Mohammed Sahib. Epifania Suafo'a Taua'i.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An archaeological survey covering 50 acres was conducted in and around Luatele or Judds Crater, an extinct volcano, on Taʻu Island, Manuʻa District, American Samoa. The project identified 24 precontact sites comprising 101 archaeological features and a 142 m cave associated with the Samoan legend of Vaatausili. These features include star mounds, oval boulder...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyra Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialism has had significant influences on lifeways across the South Pacific, including health and diet in the past and today. Colonially introduced diets have caused a loss of traditional food practices, created cultural power dynamics, and have led to contemporary public health issues. These colonial legacies not only have continued impacts on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Flexner.

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have long appeared to Western eyes as naturally bounded entities. It has been proposed that they represent ‘natural laboratories’ for understanding natural and cultural evolution. At the same time, islands are recognised as contact zones, for example historian Greg Dening has outlined the significance of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fitzpatrick.

Centuries ago in western Micronesia, Yapese islanders began traveling to the Palauan archipelago to carve their famous stone money from limestone, which they then transported back to use in a variety of social transactions. While commonly referred to as ‘money’, these disks were not currency in the strict sense, though their value is not dissimilar to other traditional and modern objects where worth is arbitrary based on both real and perceived attributes (e.g., size, shape, quality, pedigree,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Rieth. Robert DiNapoli. Carl Lipo. Terry Hunt.

This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tom Dye was an early adopter and advocate for the application of Bayesian chronological modeling in Pacific archaeology. Since the 1990s, this chronology-building method has advanced our understanding of key cultural and demographic events through improved and diverse software options, better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter White. Robin Torrence. Vince Neall.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A volcanic environment built up by characterised and well dated airfall tephras is paradise for landscape archaeology because in any excavation the cultural material is placed accurately in time. Shouldn’t this setting also be ideal for environmental data? With expertise provided by Steve Athens, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Cochrane. Seth Quintus. Matiu Prebble. Ta'iao Matiu Matavai Tautunu.

This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explanations of sociopolitical complexity are often linked to competition over the control of resources and changes in resource structure, including productivity, predictability, distribution, and other characteristics. These explanations also reference variables of human demography and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Shapiro.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analyses of lidar datasets have allowed archaeologists to expand the study of archaeological landscapes to study extensively human-modified environments at regional scales with more advanced geospatial methods. In Sāmoa, lidar reveals networks of ditches, terraces, and other earthen- and stone-monumental architectural features which extend from the coast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Regina Hilo.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Working and consulting with the community is built into Hawaii’s historic preservation laws and statutes. I work for the History and Culture branch of the State Historic Preservation Division, and my main role is mitigating effects to human skeletal remains, iwi...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Napolitano. Scott Fitzpatrick. Geoffrey Clark. Amy Gusick. Esther Mietes.

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial human settlement of Yap, a group of four small islands in western Micronesia, is one of the least understood colonization events in Remote Oceania. Unlike Polynesia, where multiple lines of evidence such as linguistics, genetics, and material culture analyses coalesce around a coherent narrative of initial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Along the base of Muliwai Pali in Waipio Valley, Hawaii the King’s Trail gently travels through a traditional cultural landscape rich in moʻolelo (story) and genealogy. During the summer of 2020 descendants of Waipio, Muliwai and Waimanu participated in the documentation and mapping of select portions within a 1.5 mile corridor of this kuamoʻo (trail) from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharyn Jones.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taking inspiration from post-humanist theory, I frame my work about human life both past and present in a way that attempts to avoid traditional concretized definitions of humanity and culture that envision these subjects as separate from nature or the environment. Post-humanists view humanity as only part of a much bigger and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

Archaeologists increasingly emphasize the role of social and cultural context in understanding how indigenous groups in colonial settings appropriated foreign goods. While documentary accounts of explorers, traders, and missionaries have long been used by Pacific historians to examine foreign trade in Hawaii’s early colonial period, archaeological sites from this period have rarely been identified. As a result, we know little about how foreign goods acquired through such exchanges were actually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While researchers once considered the residents of hinterlands as the passive recipients of social and cultural influence, scholars have increasingly reframed these regions as dynamic zones of innovation and creative adaptation. Hinterlands have often been mentioned in investigations of indigenous sites in the context of European colonialism. Still,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb. Victor Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesian atolls are often viewed as outlying provinces or "outer Islands" as compared to larger high islands. These often remote and diminutive coral islands are, and were, home to relatively small populations. Many coral island groups trace ancestry to, and had sustained contact with, high islands. These past connections and modern sociopolitical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Greig. Richard Walter.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of ‘hinterland’ encompasses ideas of distance, marginality and challenge and is often contrasted with ‘core’, which in turn implies centrality and resource richness. In this paper we address the applicability of both these concepts in New Zealand and examine their role in understanding long-term Maori history. We suggest that high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rona Ikehara-Quebral. Michael Pietrusewsky. Michele Toomay Douglas.

Cultural flattening of the posterior skull, rare in the Mariana Islands, was recently observed in multiple human skeletons from a Latte Period site in Guam. Prior to this study, only one case of possible artificial cranial modification was reported for this region. The cranium of a young adult female from Songsong Village, Rota, was described as having "asymmetrical deformation in the occipital region consistent with artificial shaping practices." In a review of the ethnohistoric literature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Comer. Douglas Comer. Adrian Borsa. Bruce Chapman. Benjamin Holt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the advent of certain satellite-borne lidar instruments, the availability of free and extensive lidar data suitable for archaeological applications has become plausible. Here we use an airborne lidar data set collected over the island of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, as a reference to test the utility of two satellite-borne lidar...