The Mystery Dogs of Remote Oceania: An Archaeological and Ethnohistorical View of Domestic Dog Introduction and Loss in the South Pacific

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Domestic dogs comprise one part of the suite of plants and animals transported by voyagers to the islands of Remote Oceania. The distribution of these, and other domesticates, is inconsistent from island to island and from archipelago to archipelago. New archaeological fieldwork, zooarchaeological analysis, and AMS dating demonstrate that settlers introduced dogs to the atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga in East Polynesia at the time of the first human arrivals ca. AD 1290–1390 and maintained them until after European contact in AD 1606. Dogs died out on the atolls prior to missionization in AD 1849. Archaeological reports and ethnohistoric text analyzed for 35 islands / island groups in Remote Oceania reveal regional patterns of introduction and loss. The findings indicate that voyaging peoples introduced dogs to the majority of the island groups in Remote Oceania before European contact, and that rates of pre-European localized extinction were high. The highest rates of loss occur on low-coral islands suggesting that low-island vulnerabilities and spatial constraints on population size may affect dog survivorship. This analysis suggests that the dogs of Remote Oceania have a complex history in which introduction to new islands was common, but long-term survival was difficult.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32150