Chronological Modeling of Early Settlement on Yap, Western Micronesia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The initial human settlement of Yap, a group of four small islands in western Micronesia, is one of the least understood colonization events in Remote Oceania. Unlike Polynesia, where multiple lines of evidence such as linguistics, genetics, and material culture analyses coalesce around a coherent narrative of initial colonization, these same lines of evidence have resulted in major discrepancies that place colonization between 3,300 and 2,200 years ago with a possible homeland originating from somewhere in Island Southeast Asia or New Guinea and/or the Bismarck Archipelago as Lapita culture was developing. A clear understanding of Yap’s early settlement has been hampered by a lack of systematic archaeological fieldwork and limited geomorphological reconstruction, making it difficult to model where early sites may have been located. Here we present results of systematic subsurface survey, excavation, preliminary paleoenvironmental and geomorphological reconstructions, and more than 30 new cultural and noncultural radiocarbon dates that shed new light on evidence for the earliest known settlement in Yap.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33244