Pacific Islands (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (157 Records)
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 island communities of Oceania, and none more so than that of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), continue to develop their economies, modern identities, and narratives of their cultural past based on plentiful archaeological remains that are visited by hundreds, or even thousands, of people on a daily basis. While archaeologists surge...
Manihiki & Rakahanga: Archaeological Research on a Dual-Atoll Cluster in East Polynesia (2018)
Archaeological fieldwork was completed on the atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga, in the northern Cook Islands, from May to July of 2015 and from July to November of 2017. This includes survey and mapping on six islets, the documentation of extant and past fish traps and fishponds, lagoon to ocean shovel test sampling, and the excavation of habitation and resource production sites. This work identified village centers on each atoll and preliminary analyses indicate that the coral-cluster landscape...
Methodological Considerations for Modeling the Temporal Characteristics of Hawaiian Architecture: An Example from Kekaha Kai, North Kona (2023)
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. In this presentation we build on Tom Dye’s pioneering approach to modeling the temporal parameters of Hawaiian architecture with an example from Kekaha Kai, North Kona, where he conducted archaeological investigations nearly two decades ago. We report a suite of uranium-thorium dates acquired from...
Micro-remains in Sediment as Indicators of Human Activity (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant microfossil analysis has been utilized for environmental reconstruction at numerous archaeological sites around the world; however, the process of preparing and examining samples is labor intensive, requiring skill and a large investment of time in order to manually obtain sufficient count numbers. Furthermore, observations based on microfossil...
Microbiologically Influenced Corrosion of World War II Aircraft Wrecks in the Pacific (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Aircraft were a major component of the U.S. war effort in World War II, and today numerous examples can be found throughout the waters of the Asia-Pacific region. Due to their cultural and historical significance to modern stakeholders, understanding the decay trajectories has become an important issue in the realm of cultural heritage management, especially...
Modeling the Early Settlement of Yap, Western Caroline Islands (2018)
In recent decades, increased research on the early human settlement of islands in western Micronesia (northwest tropical Pacific) has resulted in a relatively clear picture of the Palau and the Mariana Islands being settled between ca. 3200-2800 years cal BP. Despite an increased understanding of when the two major archipelagos were settled, human arrival in Yap, a group of four small islands situated between the two other islands groups, remains unclear. New radiocarbon dates from the southern...
Mollusk Foraging and Gendered Labor in Seventeenth-Century Guam, Mariana Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological investigation of gendered labor in traditional households in the Mariana Islands is still in a nascent stage of development. Archaeological field school excavations by the University of Guam Micronesian Area Research Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa yielded a rich assemblage of...
Moving within the ‘A‘ā: The Influence of Liminality in the Hinterlands of Manukā, Ka‘ū, Hawai‘i Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated at the transition between windward and leeward sides of the island of Hawai‘i, Manukā is a tapestry of environmental and sociopolitical gradients perpetually reconfigured by the lava flows from Mauna Loa. As a geographically liminal region, place-names describe it as where "the trade winds of Ka‘ū give way to the gentle breezes of Kona." The...
A Multi-proxy Investigation of Settlement on Pingelap Atoll, Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pacific atolls are generally regarded as challenging places to live. In addition to being far from other land masses, most have low biodiversity, limited access to freshwater, and are susceptible to extreme weather. However, settlers established residence on atolls in the Micronesian region as early as 2,000 years ago. This paper presents the first major...
Multiscalar Island Colonization Estimates through Bayesian Calibration Models (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologically, island colonization may be estimated at different geographical and temporal scales. Whereas behaviorally, colonization is a single landfall event, identifying the location of this initial landing in the archaeological record is not always possible due to site preservation, taphonomic, and sampling...
The Mystery Dogs of Remote Oceania: An Archaeological and Ethnohistorical View of Domestic Dog Introduction and Loss in the South Pacific (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestic dogs comprise one part of the suite of plants and animals transported by voyagers to the islands of Remote Oceania. The distribution of these, and other domesticates, is inconsistent from island to island and from archipelago to archipelago. New archaeological fieldwork, zooarchaeological analysis, and AMS dating demonstrate...
Na Ko`i O Wai`ahukini: Adze Size and Sources of Toolstone at Wai`ahukini Rockshelter (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Wai‘ahukini Rockshelter (H8/50-Ha-B21-006), located near South Point on the Island of Hawai‘i, was initially investigated by K. P. Emory, W. Bonk, and Y. Sinoto in the 1950s. The collection has since been curated at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, HI....
Natural-Cultural Contexts of the First Inhabited Seashores of Remote Pacific Oceania: 1500–1100 BC in the Mariana Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People first migrated to the remote-distance Pacific Islands around 1500 BC, and their ancient sites have provided insights into the physical and cultural world that these people had inhabited. Geoarchaeological investigations have clarified the composition of the coastal landforms and ecosystems, availability of...
Navigating Public LiDAR in Samoa (2019)
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. In 2014, The World Bank helped the government of Samoa to launch a climate resilience program. Included in this initiative was the financing of a light detecting and ranging (LiDAR) survey throughout the entirety of the country. Although originally meant solely for national climate information services and hazard mapping, the LiDAR...
Nearly Two Millennia of Occupation along Ylig Bay, Guam: Archaeological, Osteological, and Paleoenvironmental Data (2019)
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. Through CRM compliance-mandated investigations nearly two millennia of occupation at Ylig Bay, Guam, has been documented. Stratified archaeological deposits at three locales along the northern portion of the embayment reveal late Pre-Latte occupation and a possible decades- to centuries-long hiatus...
Necromancing the Stone: Archaeologists and Adzes in Samoa (1992)
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 Ngake 001 Site: Surface Mapping and Subsurface Investigations (2018)
The Ngake 001 site is located on Manihiki Atoll in the northern Cook Islands. In all, the site covers an area of roughly two hectars and consists of four coral-edged courts, two small coral-edged enclosures, a possible well, part of a lagoon shore path, and a mound and trench system that provides access to the islet’s Ghyben-Herzberg freshwater lens. Multiple surveys, by the authors and others, suggest that the Ngake 001 site is situated at the center of a large prehistoric village complex that...
Nā Wahine o nā ʻĀina Kuleana: Assessing the Impact of Colonization on Gender Experience in North Kohala, Hawaiʻi Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While pre-contact gender in Hawaiʻi has primarily been interpreted in terms of the kapu and its regulation on food, close analysis of multiple ethnographic sources reveal that gender was more complicated than originally realized. Therefore, examination of gender experience in Hawaiʻi needs to be location specific. My research highlights the value of...
Of Islands and Dogs: Ethnohistoric and Isotopic Pathways toward Understanding Past Dog Diet in Tropical Oceania (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts suggest people treated dogs differently across Oceania at the time of European contact. European accounts often state that the dogs of Oceania were fed plant foods such as breadfruit, coconut, yams, and taro. Some sources also reference dogs eating fish or taking on the roles of scavengers and hunters. Collectively these accounts...
On Taro, Tridacna, and Turtles: Using a Multiproxy Method to Explore Food, Fishing, and Agriculture on Pingelap, a Micronesian Atoll (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pingelap Atoll, located in Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia, has been home to humans for approximately 1,700 years. At 1.8 km2 and 70 km from its nearest island neighbor, food procurement has traditionally relied on marine fishing and hunting as well as intensive management of the coral island...
"The Other Half of the Sky": Competitive Anarchy in Contact-Era Palau (2018)
This paper explores the way in which contact-era Palauan society negotiated between hierarchy and heterarchy to ensure long-term sociopolitical stability, developing and deploying a theory of competitive anarchy. The evaluation critiques the frequent correlation of complexity with hierarchy and centrality and does so through a geostatistical analysis. This investigation begins with the development of a proposed model of Palauan sociopolitical structure, derived through ethnographic descriptions...
Overcoming Variability in Zooarchaeological Data Quality (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Numerous paleoclimate proxies from Aotearoa New Zealand indicate the Little Ice Age (ca. 1450 – 1900 CE) caused marked changes in local conditions that could have affected the productivity of marine fisheries. Considering the critical relationships that have always existed between fisheries and Māori economic, social, and spiritual life, any changes in...
Paleo-sediment Coring Studies in Micronesia: A Review and Critique (2019)
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. Paleo-sediment coring studies by archaeologists, pioneered in Micronesia by Steve Athens and colleagues, including myself, in the 1980s, are reviewed and assessed for their contributions to archaeological science in the western Pacific within a CRM context. It is suggested that while data generated...
A Pattern of Islands: Ethnography, Remote Sensing, and Community Archaeology in Kosrae and Pohnpei, Micronesia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Knowledge of navigation and island living among indigenous people of the western Pacific Ocean retain lifeways, legends, and oral history about their migrations in the region. Western enlightenment theories of Pacific migration persist in describing this migration as a wave or diffusion of peoples seeking new lands. However, among islanders, it is...
The People of Solomon: Performance in Cross-Cultural Contacts between Spanish and Melanesians in the SW Pacific 1568–1606 (2018)
In 1568, 1595 and 1606 Spanish expeditions out of Peru explored the Solomon Islands (S.W. Pacific) with the intention of establishing colonies. The motivations for these voyages were an uneasy amalgam of ambitions for Imperial and familial advancement, attempts to find the gold mines of Ophir, and religious fervor for converting indigenous populations. Despite repeated historical retelling, little attention has been paid to the structures of the cross-cultural encounters described in the...