Examining The Temporal Scale of Human-Environmental Relationships on Ofu Island, Manu‘a Group, American Samoa

Summary

Pacific Islands have long been considered natural laboratories or model systems for the examination of human-environmental relationships. The impact of temporally variable environments on human populations is now well-documented throughout the Pacific, though questions remain on how the variable temporal scale of environmental change can modify the human response to these changes. An opportunity to address this question is presented by the cultural sequence of Ofu Island, a small island in the Manu’a Group of the Samoan archipelago, in which the impact of both short-term environmental hazards and long-term landscape evolution is apparent. The reconfiguration of the coastline through the 1st millennium AD led to a transition in human settlement and subsistence patterns, eventually leading to permanent settlement in the island’s interior uplands. The recurrence of quasi-predictable hurricanes, on the other hand, led to investment in infrastructure to mitigate the effects of hazards on the terrestrial food production system. The differential response to these environmental factors can be understood in terms of risk and uncertainty. Furthermore, the influence of coastal reconfiguration is significant on small islands such as Ofu, where marine regression modifies the ratio of shallow marine environments to terrestrial lowlands.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Evolution and Ecology in Oceania

Keywords

Spatial Coverage