Feasting and Gift Giving in Pre-Contact and Spanish Colonial Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands of Micronesia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Feasting and gift-giving in the ethnography, history, and archaeology of native peoples in Southeast Asia and its islands in the Western Pacific are often given primacy in accounts of academic fieldwork. Some ethnohistoric accounts on the pre-Contact and Spanish Colonial Chamorro people indigenous to Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands of Micronesia also mention similar behavior during the early Spanish contact and ensuing 300 years of colonial rule until 1898. Archaeological fieldwork and analyses of the Pre-Latte and Latte Periods in the archipelago, however, pay scant attention to recognizing evidence of such events in the material record. This study presents measures for evaluating aspects of feasting and gift-giving at two prehistoric sites on Saipan in the Marianas archipelago between approximately 1500 BC and AD 1668.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37799.0