Uniformity and Regional Variation in Marine Fish Catches from Prehistoric New Zealand

Catch patterns of prehistoric Maori fishing, including their regional variations, have been described by Leach and Boocock (1993) for one large sample of archaeological assemblages. A second large sample is described here, and the results compared. The new data strengthen evidence of a narrow focus upon snapper fishing in the northern North Island and upon barracouta fishing in the southern South Island. The central regions are still inadequately represented by catch data. The overall emphasis upon a few medium-sized, shallow water, carnivorous species; regional variation in the taxa of these; and signs of a broad stability in catch patterns can be related fundamentally to the nature of a temperate-zone ichthyofauna and secondarily to probable features of the fishing gear and subsistence economy. There are some deficiencies in current data and approaches that need to be addressed. KEYWORDS: New Zealand, catch patterns, regional variation, fishing strategy

TA31: The Early Prehistory of Fiji

I enjoyed reading this volume. It is rare to see such a comprehensive report on hard data published these days, especially one so insightfully contextualised by the editors’ introductory and concluding chapters. These scholars and the others involved in the work really know their stuff, and it shows. The editors connect the preoccupations of Pacific archaeologists with those of their colleagues working in other island regions and on “big questions” of colonisation, migration, interaction and patterns and processes of cultural change in hitherto-uninhabited environments. These sorts of outward-looking, big-picture contextual studies are invaluable, but all too often are missing from locally- and regionally-oriented writing, very much to its detriment. In sum, the work strongly advances our understanding of the early prehistory of Fiji through its well-integrated combination of original research and the reinterpretation of existing knowledge in the context of wider theoretical and historical concerns. In doing so The Early Prehistory of Fiji makes a truly substantial contribution to Pacific and archaeological scholarship

AN AUSTRONESIAN PRESENCE IN SOUTHERN JAPAN: EARLY OCCUPATION IN THE YAEYAMA ISLANDS.

Archaeological research in the Yaeyama Islands, southern Japan, has a hundred year old history, yet little of it is known to those archaeologists working outside the immediate area. This area is of importance to those working in Southeast Asia and the Pacific as the colonisation of the Yaeyama Islands allows a closer assessment of the nature and timing of Austronesian movement out of Taiwan. This paper will examine the colonisation of the Yaeyama Islands and its archaeological signature, Shimotabaru pottery, by first reviewing the archaeological developments of this island group, followed by an examination of the timing of colonisation and the nature of Shimotabaru pottery production. It will be argued that the early occupation in the Yaeyama Islands characterised by Shimotabaru pottery is the signature of Austronesian colonisation from Taiwan, from between 4500 and 3900 years ago. Yet the colonising signature in the Yaeyama Islands is of a different character to the Austronesian presence in the islands south of Taiwan. This suggests that the nature of Austronesian expansion in general was more complex than is proposed in the prevailing model

The Making of the Māori Middle Ages

Literary and scientific narratives are often constructed in three parts, of which the task of the middle section is to make the beginning and the end satisfactorily consistent with each other. In this lecture I discuss some ideas about how that might be accomplished in relation to a middle or transitional phase of Māori archaeology, which I will take as dating about AD 1450-1650. Some of you might wonder whether this has not been done satisfactorily already, but I assure you that it has not. In fact, just as Medieval Europe was once seen as a dark age between the Classical era and its Renaissance, so the middle phase in Māori archaeology remains a shadowland between highlights of Polynesian colonisation and classic Māori culture

Straw boats and the proverbial sea: a response to 'Island Archaeology: In Search of a New Horizon'

In a recent ISJ paper, “Island Archaeology: In Search of a New Horizon”, Boomert and Bright (2007) argue that the field of “island archaeology” should be replaced by an “archaeology of maritime identity”. We disagree and counter that although islands share many physical, biological, and cultural similarities with continental coasts, coastal zones also grade uninterruptedly into riverine, lacustrine, and terrestrial landscapes, raising questions about the validity of their concept of the archaeology of maritime identity. In our view, island archaeology (the application of archaeology to island settings), regardless of past biogeographical underpinnings, has made major contributions to understanding the historical ecology, human impacts, and cultural developments of islands around the world. A focus on islands by archaeologists has encouraged scholars to study the history of island and maritime societies within a comparative framework that is useful for breaking out of the often provincial focus on a single island or archipelago

Word order in Topic-Focus structures in the Balkan languages

The paper examines the word order patterns of Balkan languages with respect to the representation of the discourse categories of Topic and Focus in the Left Periphery of the Balkan clause. It is argued that Balkan languages share a number of syntactic properties relevant to the discourse organization of their embeddded clauses, and it is claimed that such discourse similarities must have been favored by multi-linguistic speakers in contact situations, in particular those that led to the establishment of the Balkan Srachbund

Genetic insights into the introduction history of black rats into the eastern Indian Ocean

Islands can be powerful demonstrations of how destructive invasive species can be on endemic faunas and insular ecologies. Oceanic islands in the eastern Indian Ocean have suffered dramatically from the impact of one of the world’s most destructive invasive species, the black rat, causing the loss of endemic terrestrial mammals and ongoing threats to ground-nesting birds. We use molecular genetic methods on both ancient and modern samples to establish the origins and minimum invasion frequencies of black rats on Christmas Island and the Cocos-Keeling Islands. We find that each island group had multiple incursions of black rats from diverse geographic and phylogenetic sources. Furthermore, contemporary black rat populations on these islands are highly admixed to the point of potentially obscuring their geographic sources. These hybridisation events between black rat taxa also pose potential dangers to human populations on the islands from novel disease risks. Threats of ongoing introductions from yet additional geographic sources is highlighted by genetic identifications of black rats found on ships, which provides insight into how recent ship-borne human smuggling activity to Christmas Island can negatively impact its endemic species

Reconsidering precolumbian human colonization in the Galápagos Islands, Republic of Ecuador

Fifty years ago, Heyerdahl and Skjølsvold (1956, 1990) collected material from five archaeological sites in the Galápagos Islands. They retained earthenwares of possible precolumbian origin and discarded ceramic, metal, and glass artifacts postdating the arrival of the Spanish in A.D. 1535. Consequently, they argued that each site was formed as the results of a series of discard events from unrelated short-term occupations extending from the precolumbian to the historical era, and that the earthenwares represented occasional visits by fishermen from precolumbian Peru and Ecuador. In 2005, we re-excavated the sites and collected all the excavated materials. Our results show that each class of material, irrespective of age or origin, was distributed spatially and stratigraphically in the same pattern, contradicting the former assumption of multiple, unrelated occupations. We reject the palimpsest model in favor of the null hypothesis of single-phase site occupation. Analysis of putatively precolumbian pottery using optically-stimulated luminescence dating indicates that it is mostly of historical age. Radiocarbon dating confirms that the archaeological sites are younger than the sixteenth century. Research on sedimentary cores shows probable anthropogenic impacts as restricted to the last 500 years. We conclude that there was no human occupation in the Galápagos Islands until the historical era

New evidence of megafaunal bone damage indicates late colonization of Madagascar

Copyright: © 2018 Anderson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The estimated period in which human colonization of Madagascar began has expanded recently to 5000–1000 y B.P., six times its range in 1990, prompting revised thinking about early migration sources, routes, maritime capability and environmental changes. Cited evidence of colonization age includes anthropogenic palaeoecological data 2500–2000 y B.P., megafaunal butchery marks 4200–1900 y B.P. and OSL dating to 4400 y B.P. of the Lakaton’i Anja occupation site. Using large samples of newly-excavated bone from sites in which megafaunal butchery was earlier dated >2000 y B.P. we find no butchery marks until ~1200 y B.P., with associated sedimentary and palynological data of initial human impact about the same time. Close analysis of the Lakaton’i Anja chronology suggests the site dates <1500 y B.P. Diverse evidence from bone damage, palaeoecology, genomic and linguistic history, archaeology, introduced biota and seafaring capability indicate initial human colonization of Madagascar 1350–1100 y B.P

Rat Colonization and Polynesian Voyaging: another hypothesis

Robert Langdon (1995:77) disputes the long-standing proposition that Rattus exulans was dispersed by Polynesian voyaging and suggests that over hundreds of thousands or millions of years it "succeeded in getting from one island to another without any human aid at all." Between this and the conventional view lies the possibility, not yet explored in detail, that some rats were transported on canoes that had lost their human crew. I discuss this is relation to New Zealand, but the principles are the same for Easter Island.</p