The Highways and Byways of the Winds: Exploring Sailing Capability and Climate Variability in Pacific Interaction

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Current debates over migration and mobility in Pacific prehistory hinge on the capacity of mariners to sail to windward. With this ability, voyages between any two points were possible, with ease of travel conditioned on the favorability of winds. Without it, movement in any given direction was dependent on winds traveling along a similar path, a coincidence that would have been variably predictable over space and time. These factors, played out on the physical geography of the Pacific, would have made some routes more accessible than others and contributed to greater or lesser possibility of sustained interaction between islands. In this study, the capacity to make use of the winds on different paths between islands is modeled under a range of climate conditions. Large global climate datasets of daily are selectively sampled to capture winds under different kinds and phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and model calculations are made for angled passages between islands. From these models, networks emerge illustrating how assumptions about the capacity to sail to windward (or lack thereof) can influence connectivity. Implications of these networks for explaining patterns of migration and interaction in Pacific prehistory are considered in terms of contemporary archaeological data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25053