Continental Dynamics and the Shaping of Island Societies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Island archaeologists have tended to underplay the significance of continents and their social dynamics in influencing the temporal and spatial patterning witnessed among island societies at a regional and comparative level. When continents are considered, it is largely as staging posts for initial peopling, or as recipients of island trade, with much of the emphasis on generic continental factors encouraging early insular settlement, for example in the context of broader farming expansions. This paper argues that later continental dynamics involving the emergence of major polities, their networks, and associated technocomplexes played a far more crucial role in shaping the pattern of island lives in later prehistory than is currently appreciated, despite the uncontested importance of such factors over the last 500-600 years. It suggests, moreover, that specific contexts can be identified that help to explain quite precisely the historical timing of many major episodes of change in island life, including a fundamental reshaping of Cypriot society in the mid-3rd millennium BC, the earliest human activity on many of the circum-African island groups, and the chronology of sail-borne expansion into Island Southeast Asia, and across the North Atlantic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Social Archaeologies and Islands   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38250.0