Pacific Islands (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Boyd Dixon. Mike Dega.

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. This comparative assessment of the San Roque site in northern Saipan to other early Pre-Latte period sites in the Mariana Islands, circa 1500–1100 BC, presents far from uniform data that suggest that maritime settlers of the archipelago may have targeted a range of natural settings for survival upon arrival. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Stone. Mike Buckley. Scott Fitzpatrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New archaeological excavation at the Ucheliungs site, located in the Rock Islands region of Palau (northwest tropical Pacific), has yielded evidence of mortuary activity and small-scale marine foraging dating to the earliest period of human settlement in the Palauan archipelago, ca. 3000 BP. The assemblage includes a small number of artifacts consisting of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Swift. Samantha Brown. Patrick Kirch. Seth Quintus. Patrick Roberts.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analysis in the Pacific is often limited by the large proportion of small, highly fragmented, non-diagnostic remains recovered from archaeological sites. Recent advances in biomolecular methods, including collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (a.k.a. ZooMS) enable increased taxonomic identifications and refine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Ingleman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analyses of pre-contact Hawaiian midden deposits have yielded significant information on subsistence practices and, to a lesser extent, associated foodways practices. Archaeologists have also occasionally excavated burials of non-human domesticated animals, including dog, pig, and chicken. These ritual deposits provide unparalleled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Golitko. Mirko Uy. Melissa Berke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological interest in environmental and human impacts on society and ecosystems has intensified, with mounting evidence of global anthropogenic climate change and landscape modification. Tropical lowland forests, once believed to represent pristine ecologies only marginally impacted by human activity, are now understood to reflect millennia of human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Lilley. Kelsey Lowe. Nick Bainton. Richard Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Queensland (UQ) has partnered with DPAA to bring renewed focus to a search in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea, that has been continuing intermittently since an aircraft went missing in 1943. The operation is challenging because we have only a general idea of where the plane went down...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scarlett Chiu. Yu-Yin Su. David Killick. Christophe Sand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we will illustrate the number of possible pottery-making locations that we have identified so far from the Lapita pottery assemblage excavated at Kurin site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia. We first examined the non-plastic inclusions to determine whether minerals and rock fragments identified through a petrographic microscope may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Spencer Lambert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists approach the topic of ancient foodways in two major ways: by focusing on ‘diet’ and adaptation to local environments, or more recently, by focusing on ‘cuisine,’ through culturally specific rules about how food is acquired, prepared, consumed, and discarded. Few, however, have attempted to consider how changes in diet and cuisine have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tradition of resource-use prohibition known as rahui is found throughout the Pacific Islands. Rahui typically involves placing certain resources or areas of the land and sea under the protection of a central authority. For rahui to exist the concept of collective resource exploitation must also exist. This appears antithetical to the traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Field. John Dudgeon. Christopher Roos. Amy Commendador. Rebecca Hazard.

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. Previous GIS-based analyses (2017) by the authors have identified the ranges of several classes of terrestrial fauna that would inhabited the island of Viti Levu in prehistory. The ranges and habits of reptiles (giant tortoises, iguanas, and snakes), flightless birds (megapodes and giant pigeons), and bat and seabird colonies intersect in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert J. DiNapoli. Terry L. Hunt. Carl P. Lipo.

Pre-European contact Rapa Nui (Easter Island) society is well-known for its substantial investment in monumental architecture, including over 300 platforms (ahu) and almost 1000 statues (moai). Recent theoretical and empirical research on the island suggests that ahu and moai were focal points for competitive and cooperative signaling by relatively small-scale communities dispersed across on the island. Evaluation of this hypothesis, however, requires the measurement of the amount of energy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Vacca.

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Queer theory is an important tool for critically analyzing ideas about the past that are normalized and reproduced to the detriment of descendant populations. This approach is particularly relevant when investigating the social structures that governed daily life in the past....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick D. Nunn.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only John O'Connor.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The island of Raiatea in the Leeward Society Islands of French Polynesia is viewed as a central place for the initial colonization of East Polynesia and the dispersal of pre-contact voyaging populations to distantly located islands of the Pacific Ocean. This history is embedded in the oral traditions of Pacific Island peoples and supported by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scarlett Chiu. Christophe Sand. Yuyin Su. David Killick.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans first arrived in New Caledonia during the Lapita seaborne expansion from New Guinea to Tonga between 1250 and 800 cal BC. We use stylistic and petrographic analyses of Lapita pottery to study social relationships among Lapita communities. New Caledonia has a large island (Grande Terre) with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Tsang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art and its ethnographic study provide important insights to understand people’s connection to place. In this research, formal and informed methods were used to analyze four stenciled rock art sites in Auwim village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). One thousand and seventy-seven rock art motifs were identified while the ethnographic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kahn.

As studies of sustainability and resilience in pre-contact Polynesian societies proliferate, records of small-scale and large-scale environmental change are being refined. Yet the question of what drives social change, human actions or climatic factors, is still quite hard to discern. My case study focuses on non-human agency, particularly eroding landforms and climatic conditions, as forces of change in pre-contact East Polynesia. A Society Island case study outlines varied human responses to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Riordan. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

This poster reports on field-work and laboratory investigations conducted on geoarchaeological samples from Naihehe Cave, located in the Sigatoka river valley of Viti Levu, Fiji. This research employs novel and exploratory methods, including Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to determine the elemental content of sediment samples and for detailed imagery useful in grain size and shape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Moral.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the arrival of a group of Hispanic Jesuits to the Mariana Islands in 1668, an ethnosexual conflict emerged between the colonists and the local communities (the Chamorros). After that conflict, Chamorro communities were relocated in new villages, the so-called reducciones, under the close surveillance of the Spanish colonial powers. This reduction brought...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy. Dion O’Neale. Christopher Stevenson. Thegn Ladefoged.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of obsidian artifacts from sites across Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the 1960s-80s, were critical to identifying a major decrease in mobility, just prior to the onset of endemic warfare, marked by the construction of thousands of fortifications by the ancestors of Māori. Unfortunately, initial enthusiasm was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Quintus. Jeffrey Clark. David Addison.

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. Radiocarbon and other radiometric dating techniques are pivotal for archaeological inquiries about cultural and environmental change. How we use these techniques and interpret their results to analyze and draw conclusions about archaeological data, however, can vary somewhat from one researcher to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Quintus.

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 a "hinterland" is a tool. As such, the concept is only beneficial if it can help us understand human behavior or the archaeological record better than alternatives. Recent research has shown that it can be usefully applied in Polynesia, but its application is geographically and substantively limited. This paper will explore the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Peck. Michael Graves.

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 South Kohala Field System (SKFS), Hawai‘i Island, is a network of contoured and sloping field borders first constructed in the prehistoric period but utilized into the 19th century. Many features are located below the 750 mm rainfall isohyet, the lower boundary for rainfed agriculture in Hawai‘i. In order to sustain agriculture in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sherwood. Jo Anne Van Tilburg. Casey Barrier.

This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rano Raraku on Easter Island (RapaNui) is famous as the source of the megalithic moai statues. Past research by the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) documented and mapped the statues. Other studies, based on coring the freshwater lake in Rano Raraku, identified microbotanical evidence of a cultivated landscape inside the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Peck. Noa Lincoln. Michael Graves.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The uplands of Kawaihae 1 ahupua‘a, Hawai‘i Island, contain a dense fixed-field agricultural field system built, utilized, and occupied by Hawaiians from as early as the 17th century into the 19th – early 20th century. This field system includes a diverse array of agricultural practices including fixed-field agriculture, planting mounds, terracing, and water...