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Archaeologists have traditionally considered islands as distinct physical and social entities. In this book, Paul Rainbird discusses the historical construction of this characterization and questions the basis for such an understanding of island archaeology. Through a series of case studies of prehistoric archaeology in the Mediterranean, Pacific, Baltic, and Atlantic seas and oceans, he argues for a decentering of the land in favor of an emphasis on the archaeology of the sea and, ultimately, a new perspective on the making of maritime communities. The archaeology of islands is thus unshackled from approaches that highlight boundedness and isolation, and replaced with a new set of principles - that boundaries are fuzzy, islanders are distinctive in their expectation of contacts with people from over the seas, and that island life can tell us much about maritime communities. Debating islands, thus, brings to the fore issues of identity and community and a concern with Western construction of other peoples.
This volume details how new theories and methods have recently advanced the archaeological study of initial human colonization of islands around the world, including in the southwest Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. This global perspective brings into comparison the wide variety of approaches used to study these early migrations and illuminates current debates in island archaeology. Evidence of island colonization is often difficult to find, especially in areas impacted by sea level rise, and these essays demonstrate how researchers have tackled this and other issues. Contributors show the potential of computer simulations of voyaging in determining the range of timing and origin points that were possible in the past. They discuss how Bayesian modeling helps address uncertainties and controversies surrounding radiocarbon dating. Additionally, advances in biomolecular techniques such as ancient DNA (aDNA), paleoproteomics, analysis of human microbiota, and improved resolution in isotopic analyses are providing more refined information on the homelands of initial settlers, on individual life courses, and on population-level migrations. Islands offer rich opportunities to examine the exploratory nature of the human species, providing insights into the evolution of watercraft technologies and wayfinding, the impact of humans on their new environments, and the motivations for their journeys. The Archaeology of Island Colonization represents the innovative ways today's archaeologists are reconstructing these unique paleolandscapes. A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson
African Islands provides the first geographically and chronologically comprehensive overview of the archaeology of African islands. This book draws archaeologically informed histories of African islands into a single synthesis, focused on multiple issues of common interest, among them human impacts on previously uninhabited ecologies, the role of islands in the growth of long-distance maritime trade networks, and the functioning of plantation economies based on the exploitation of unfree labour. Addressing and repairing the longstanding neglect of Africa in general studies of island colonization, settlement, and connectivity, it makes a distinctively African contribution to studies of island archaeology. The availability of this much-needed synthesis also opens up a better understanding of the significance of African islands in the continent's past as a whole. After contextualizing chapters on island archaeology as a field and an introduction to the variety of Africa’s islands and the archaeological research undertaken on them, the book focuses on four themes: arriving, altering, being, and colonizing and resisting. An interdisciplinary approach is taken to these themes, drawing on a broad range of evidence that goes beyond material remains to include genetics, comparative studies of the languages, textual evidence and oral histories, island ecologies, and more. African Islands provides an up-to-date synthesis and account of all aspects of archaeological research on Africa’s islands for students and academics alike.
A case study of the Greek Cyclades, documenting new ways of studying global island archaeology.
This volume focuses on the archaeology and historical ecology of a series of islands located off the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California, from the Channel Islands to Cedros Island.
Providing a synthesis of archaeological and historical anthropological knowledge of the indigenous cultures of the Pacific islands, this text focuses on human ecology and island adaptations.
Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.
Archaeology of the Solomon Islands presents the outcome of 20 years research in the Solomon Islands undertaken jointly by Richard Walter and Peter Sheppard, both leaders in the eld of Pacific archaeology. At the time of first European encounter, the peoples of Melanesia exhibited some of the greatest diversity in language, socio-political organisation and culture expression of any region on earth. This extraordinary diversity attracted scholars and resulted in coastal Melanesia becoming the birthplace of modern anthropology, and yet the area remains one of the least well-documented regions of the Pacific in archaeological terms. This synthesis of Solomon Island archaeology draws together all the research that has taken place in the field over the past 50 years. It takes a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach and considers the work of archaeologists, environmental scientists, anthropologists and historians. At the same time this volume highlights the results of the authors own considerable field research. Until recently, much Pacific archaeological research focused primarily on colonisation events and cultural-ecological interactions. Walter and Sheppard are interested too in the long-term development of diversity in coastal Melanesia and in the evolution of traditional Melanesian societies. As a case study they focus on the Roviana Chiefdom, an aggressive but highly successful polity based around headhunting, slave raiding and ritual violence that dominated the political economy of the Western Province into the early twentieth century. They also integrate the Solomon Islands into ongoing models and debates around Pacific culture - history, including in such key areas as human expansion during the Pleistocene, the spread of Austronesians, Lapita colonisation, the development of food production, the role of exchange systems, the concept and meaning of culture areas, and human impact on landscapes and ecosystems. This fascinating and very readable book is written for an archaeological audience but is also designed to be accessible to all readers interested in Pacific archaeology, anthropology and history. Featuring more than a hundred maps and figures, Archaeology of the Solomon Islands represents a ground-breaking contribution to Pacific archaeology.
Were there major population collapses on Pacific Islands following first contact with the West? If so, what were the actual population numbers for islands such as Hawai‘i, Tahiti, or New Caledonia? Is it possible to develop new methods for tracking the long-term histories of island populations? These and related questions are at the heart of this new book, which draws together cutting-edge research by archaeologists, ethnographers, and demographers. In their accounts of exploration, early European voyagers in the Pacific frequently described the teeming populations they encountered on island after island. Yet missionary censuses and later nineteenth-century records often indicate much smaller populations on Pacific Islands, leading many scholars to debunk the explorers’ figures as romantic exaggerations. Recently, the debate over the indigenous populations of the Pacific has intensified, and this book addresses the problem from new perspectives. Rather than rehash old data and arguments about the validity of explorers’ or missionaries’ accounts, the contributors to this volume offer a series of case studies grounded in new empirical data derived from original archaeological fieldwork and from archival historical research. Case studies are presented for the Hawaiian Islands, Mo‘orea, the Marquesas, Tonga, Samoa, the Tokelau Islands, New Caledonia, Aneityum (Vanuatu), and Kosrae.