Ring Graph Analyses of Early Communities on Rapa Nui Measuring the Distribution of Stone-lined Earth Ovens (umu)

Summary

Agricultural societies are commonly thought to have begun as small, kinship-based groups of people that eventually extended their social interaction beyond the household level and intensified their adaptive efforts through a variety of means. Most of these early, sedentary communities began to demonstrate aspects of social inequality and had cooperative, centralized settlements which have left a detectable pattern in the archaeological record. For this paper, stone-lined earth ovens from the remote Pacific island of Rapa Nui were chosen for a spatial analysis of settlement patterns using a ring graph technique developed by Drennan and Peterson (2008). Ring graphs are derived from the more traditional approaches of rank-size graphs and histograms which have been used for the last several decades to study settlement distributions and to determine the nature of stratification and interaction in sedentary, agriculturally based societies. The results of this analysis were used comparatively to investigate the possible centralization of early Rapa Nui communities. An emphasis on the intra-regional variation in settlement dynamics exhibited by the colonizers of this isolated island were discussed within a behavioral ecological framework.

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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