Republic of Palau (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magdalena Schmid. Fiona Petchey.

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. Demography is a key factor in investigating the relationships between population levels, along with resource availability, environmental dynamics, social organization, and mobility. Prehistoric human activities and population levels can be modeled using summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates...

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 John Peterson.

Nan Madol monument in Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia was inscribed on the World Heritage list in July 2016. The same day it was listed on the Endangered List for World Heritage sites by the Committee. The designation was meant to insist on the seriousness of conservation and management planning and it has had a profound impact. A Conservation Plan has been launched, supported in part by UNESCO, and fine-grained monitoring with geocontrols, 3-D mapping, UAV structure-in-motion...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ursula Brosseder.

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age landscape in Mongolia is characterized by valleys with regularly arranged groups of monuments which are believed to represent the focus of a community. Depending on the ecology of the area the distance between such site clusters varies. This even distribution is punctuated by large concentrations of...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Acabado.

The origins of the extensive wet-rice terrace complex in Ifugao, Philippines have been recently dated to ca. 400 years ago. Previously thought to be at least 2,000 years old, the recent findings of the Ifugao Archaeological Project show that landscape modification for terraced wet-rice cultivation started at ca. 1600. The archaeological record implies that economic intensification and political consolidation occurred in Ifugao soon after the appearance of the Spanish empire in the northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peng Lyu. Katherine Brunson. Jing Yuan. Zhipeng Li.

This paper reviews current evidence for the origins of domestic cattle in China. We describe two possible scenarios: 1) domestic cattle were domesticated indigenously in East Asia from the wild aurochs (Bos primigenius), and 2) domestic cattle were domesticated elsewhere and then introduced to China. We conclude that the current zooarchaeological and genetic evidence does not support indigenous domestication within China, although it is possible that people experimented with managing wild...