Small Islands and Constructed Landscapes: A Bayesian Cultural Chronology of the Manuʻa Group

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Radiocarbon and other radiometric dating techniques are pivotal for archaeological inquiries about cultural and environmental change. How we use these techniques and interpret their results to analyze and draw conclusions about archaeological data, however, can vary somewhat from one researcher to another, and certainly have varied over time. In Oceania, developments in the analysis of radiometric dates owe much to the work of Tom Dye, particularly his emphasis on the applications of Bayesian statistics and his discussion of temporal process. To honor these contributions, we present, integrate, analyze, and synthesize over 150 radiometric dates associated with three small islands of the Manuʻa Group in American Samoa. We document substantial variation in the number of dated contexts across the cultural sequence, which reflects the kinds of research questions that have been posed. We note how the techniques introduced and used by Tom Dye can help us understand the sequence of settlement on the islands, which serves as a useful case study that potentially can be scaled up to larger settings elsewhere in the Central Pacific.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35735.0