Welcome to My Nightmare - Ancient DNA from Pacific Islands

Summary

Recent reports of ancient DNA recovery from samples that are 10s if not 100s of thousands of years old attest to the amazing developments in aDNA technology in recent years. Unfortunately, most aDNA from the Pacific Islands is poorly preserved and highly degraded. Despite the relatively short history of settlement on many Pacific Islands, ancient DNA is often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain from archaeological samples recovered from Pacific sites. Still, we are able to recover aDNA sequence from an increasing number of animal and human samples from across the Pacific which are providing intriguing clues about the complexity of Pacific settlement history. Several examples from our lab will be presented, demonstrating both the powers and the pitfalls of working with ancient DNA in the Pacific and integrating aDNA data with the archaeological record to reconstruct aspects of Pacific settlement and prehistory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Primer of the Ancient Mariner: New Perspectives on aDNA Research and the Prehistoric Colonization of Islands

Keywords

Spatial Coverage