Easter Island Foundation and Pacific Institute

"A Palynologist Looks at the Colonization of the Pacific".

CONFERENCE SESSION DESCRIPTION

& SELECTED ABSTRACTS

Several recent and widely read papers have challenged conventional notions about the early settlement of Rapa Nui, the tempo of cultural elaboration as expressed through architecture, and when the fragmentation of Rapa Nui society occurred. In addition, there have been new contributions that highlight the importance of prehistoric agricultural intensification on the organization of Rapa Nui society. Recent excavations and a renewed emphasis on landscape survey are providing new information on all of these critical issues. In this session the solicited papers will address subject matter that can help clarify the key events and processes that helped shaped Rapa Nui society.

We have analysed the archaeological sites, buildings, megalithic monuments, tools, agricultures terraces, and manavai developed during Rapa Nui prehistory and correlated them with the volcanic structures and rocks which have been identify on the geological-volcanic map of the island. These rock forms include materials such as hyaloclasthic palagonite tuff, lava tunnels, tumuliform lava flows, columnar basaltic flows, trachyte lava domes, mugearite massive flow, and aglomero lapille tuff. We present the location maps for the quarries, the rock compositions, and evidence of the different techniques used by ancient Rapanui for the extraction of rock.

The work undertaken at Ahu Motu Toremo Hiva (Poike Peninsula, Easter Island) in 2004 and 2005 has brought to light several unexpected elements: the sequential emplacement of ritual platforms, testifying to the use of a site that has at least three times been completely rearranged since its initial occupation in the late 13th-14th century AD, the systematic disassembling of pebble pavements before each phase of abandonment, and the very recycling of one statue. All of these discoveries shed new light on the history of Easter Island ritual platform construction. Recycling, disassembling, and re-use of architectural elements and statues characterize the monuments at Ahu Motu Toremo Hiva. In addition, the geomorphological study of Ahu Motu Toremo Hiva has permitted us to determine that each ahu abandonment phase was coupled with agricultural exploitation. Evidently, the traditional settlement pattern of villages inserted between the ritual platform and the agricultural land, all functioning simultaneously, must be questioned, at least in part. Finally, the skeleton of a male adult buried at the beginning of the 20th century was also found at the site. This deceased person may well have been one of the first lepers on the island.

Obsidian hydration dating has been applied on Rapa Nui since the 1960s and has served as a supplemental method to radiocarbon dating for many decades. The ability to directly date obsidian tools and to establish site occupational ranges with a large number of samples are two analytical advantages. The technique has been criticized because of the non-convergence in ages with radiocarbon dating. Several reasons for this non-convergence are discussed and new infrared calibrations for estimating hydration rim thickness and water diffusion coefficients are presented. These calibrations are applied to a large body of previously reported hydration analyses and the time depth of the samples is discussed.

Dynamic geographic data sets are essential to describing and interpreting the interaction of natural and human phenomena on the Rapa Nui cultural landscape. The Easter Island Statue Project data set is drawn from mapping the density distribution of two discrete artifact classes (petroglyphs and sculpture) as they are related to three classes of production and display sites (quarries, ceremonial centers and roads) and associated with regional socio-political identity. Experimental replication drawn from aspects of our data set has produced an ecologically predictive model that quantifies the environmental impact of these aesthetic artifacts as products of individual or communal activity, socio-political demand and the objectification of religious belief. This paper describes the concentration of statues in Rano Raraku quarry and on one branch of the statue transport road network, and examines statue presence as one byproduct of habitual production, use, discard and reuse behaviors in specific locales not directly tied to socio-political boundaries, status restrictions or resource display demands.

A rock shelter on the north coast of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), used for at least 800 years, produced a lithic assemblage that provides evidence derived from obsidian tool and debitage flake-type and aggregate analyses that is useful for interpreting aspects of early Rapa Nui technology, including resource access, production methods, and distributional patterns. Site activities include using obsidian flakes for processing primarily hard contact materials, and this interpretation is considered in light of formal tool types, individual flake implements, and a larger sample of worked edges. Observed temporal shifts in technology are limited in this collection, a continuing problem for interpreting Rapa Nui's archaeological record in general, but suggest that a stable lithic technology based on obsidian and basalt had emerged already on the island by the end of the first millennium AD.

Easter Island is one of the most isolated small outcroppings of land on the Earth , but it is not free from the effects of global geological processes and the geophysic of natural events such as volcanic eruptions and tsunami generated earthquakes that have occurred many times from the Pleistocene to recent times. A Polynesian group arrived to Easter Island during the last millennium and developed the Rapanui culture represented by the archaeological record that we see today. The island cultural chronology has been discussed by many archaeologists who base their interpretations mainly on stratigraphic excavation and radiocarbon dated contexts. We present our contribution to improve the chronological sequence by considering the impact of natural geophysical hazards on the Rapanui culture. In our resent geological survey in the island, we recognised evidence of the three important tsunami dated to 1960, 1575, and 1200 (?), which have been imprinted on the geological deposits and the destruction of megalithic monuments along the southeast coast of the island. The impacts of these events permit us to identify and estimate the construction dates of those monuments. As this research demonstrates, we need to pay more attention to the natural events in the interpretation of cultural chronologies.

(Universidad de Chile, FAU, Depto. Geografía and Instituto Estudios, Isla de Pascua)

The moai are the most emblematic megalithic monuments in the Easter Island. For many decades archaeologists have formulated many hypothesis about the different types of moai, transportation methods, route locations, and distribution between clans. Now, we present our contribution to this discussion, from a different point of view; one based on results of the geological and geophysical survey in the island. More than 95% of the moai were carved from the hyaloclastite palagonite volcanic tuff found at the Rano Raraku quarry. However, the morphology the surface volcanic rocks, their topographic location and size, plus the shape and weight of the giant moai, suggest that it was improbable that long distance transport in excess of 15 km occurred across rugged volcanic fields without damage to the sculpture. We propose that coastal ramps located not too distant from the quarry played an important role in the transport process. We propose in this paper that the main means of transport was maritime, and one of the strong reasons that accounts for the fact that more than 90% the ahu.with moai were built along the coast of the island.

Archaeological evidence for how the hypothesized prehistoric cultural collapse of Easter Island society came about has been virtually non-existent, but rather extensively assumed by much of the scientific community, and mostly by the press. The cultural and ecological collapse of Rapa Nui culture originates from a scenario first presented by Mulloy (1976). The ecological demise of the island presented by Mulloy, especially its deforestation, has since been well documented. But how did the ahu building, moai moving and erection, and the classic culture come to a halt? How did it "decline" into the small scale warfare and cannibalism found by European explorers? This paper details archaeological data that points to the process of the cultural transformation from a society that appears to have been once somewhat unified, into one that seems entirely and internally antagonistic.

The Department Geomatics of the Hafen City University, Hamburg, conducted non-contact 3D documentation of ahu and moai (e.g., Ko te Riku, Akivi, Hanga Te'e) by high-precision terrestrial laser scanning and photogrammetry, that included GPS measurements for the later transformation of the laser scanning and magnetic prospecting data into the local coordinate system (SIRGAS). This first of five documentations of the architectural remains by repeated scanning over consecutive field seasons will help to determine an average erosion rate per annum as it affects the surface of the volcanic tuff sculptures. Geophysical survey methods were also conducted in the immediate vicinity of the monuments, which was originally an integrated part of the ritual complexes. The preliminary image processing of the data revealed excellent results. Unknown and unseen archaeological structures beneath the ground are clearly visible in the grey shade plots of the magnetic image. Some of these anomalies may be explained by earlier archaeological test trenches (i.e., excavations by W. Mulloy at Ahu Akivi); others point clearly to archaeological features such as pits and ditches previously undetected during excavation or simply as yet unstudied (e.g., Ahu Hanga Te'e). Altogether the results show that we are able to trace archaeological structures beneath the ground with high resolution and in a relatively short amount of time.

West Polynesia, along with the islands of Fiji, comprise a fertile part of Oceania in which to investigate human migration, mobility, interaction and the development of complex maritime chiefdoms in the last 3,000 years. This is because the three archipelagos are relatively close to each other and canoes were able to travel regularly between different island groups, unlike most other parts of Polynesia. The prehistory of Fiji-West Polynesia displays great diversity even though the first inhabitants were all Lapita people and there was ongoing interaction among island groups. This session examines the similarities and differences in the archaeological records of Tonga and Samoa, including the development of maritime chiefdoms, and considers comparative examples of migration and social complexity in other insular environments.

The dispersal of domestic animals (pig, dog, chicken. and also commensal rats), is a source of evidence about the nature of human colonization, including, potentially, the relative success of voyaging. It has been used in support of the transported landscapes model of Oceanic economic adaptation and in suggesting, by presence / absence of taxa, the probable connections between archipelagos. Here, I review the current patterns of dispersal in relation to introduction biology and discuss them in relation to several hypotheses that might account for them.

Stone adzes are integral to investigating cultural changes within Polynesian societies due to their archaeological durability and the vital roles they held in subsistence practices. This paper delves into how adze studies can offer insights into larger socio-political changes by examining adze production and distribution during the Traditional Period in prehistoric Samoa. During this period, there was a marked increase in the quantity of adze production recorded on Tutuila Island, and a geographic expansion in the distribution of these adzes into the larger Fiji-West Polynesian region. As these transformations manifested themselves together in a certain period of time, crucial questions need to be raised; 1) how do we quantify these increases, and 2) what mechanisms, cultural or otherwise, were responsible. I propose that these increases are interrelated and a result of coeval expansion in political control exercised over production labor for wealth accumulation at the expense of kin relationships.

The influence of the Tongan maritime chiefdom in the late prehistoric era moved well beyond Tonga to incorporate not only the outer islands of the archipelago, but other parts of the Central Pacific including Fiji, Samoa, Rotuma and 'Uvea. This expansion, unique to Polynesia where the ability to project sea power was generally confined to a single island or archipelago, was achieved through trade, intermarriage, raiding, warfare and colonization. We are using traditional history, geophysics, and archaeology to examine the development of this complex Polynesian chiefdom, and its impact on other islands through a study of the chiefly centre of Mua in Tonga, and excavation of Tongan sites in eastern Fiji. The history of the sacred Tui Tonga title, which is embodied in the monumental architecture at Mua — fortifications, roads, canoe facilities, and the stone-faced burial mounds of paramount chiefs — is central to understanding the political power of the maritime chiefdom from 1300-1850 AD. We take a "Centre-out" approach to determine changes within the Tongan chiefdom, and then compare these developments to evidence for Tongan involvement on other islands. This suggests how socio-political centralisation affects maritime trade and exchange, craft specialization and colony emplacement.

During field work in 2005 our attention was drawn to an interesting prehistoric remain at the Malaefono organic plantation close to Saliemoa village on 'Upolu. The plantation area had previously housed habitations since several stone platforms / stone heaps and remains are reported removed due to farming activities during the last century. During 2006 we carried out archaeological investigations in a remaining stone platform in the area. This "star / cog" shaped platform, with eight protrusions was mapped and test excavated. The investigations showed its internal structure and its relation to other features and the surrounding landscape. The excavation also gave indications of settlement activities prior to the construction of the platform at this site. This paper presents the results of the investigation and discusses the star mound concept.

The prehistoric unique site called Fale o le fe'e (the "House of the Octopus") situated in the village of Magiagi located inland just south of Apia was already visited and described by missionaries at contact phase. The structure with its 60 stone pillars and stone lintel overlay in the form of a traditional fale (Samoan house) has been described as a mini "Stonehenge". The site has subsequently been mapped and oral tradition tied to the monument was reported by Buck and Freeman in the 1930s-40s. During the last century (especially the last 50 years) the site has deteriorated and pillars have been destroyed or fallen, a decay probably both caused by natural and human activities. In 2006 the site was visited within the frame work of the new archaeological program at NUS (National University of Samoa) with the intention to start out an archaeological project including excavation, restoration and collection of the oral tradition and ethnographical evidences. This paper presents the objectives and current results of this project. Issues concerning possibilities and problematics of archaeological research in Samoa, on a general basis are also touched upon.

Human dispersal into Near and Remote Oceania during was perhaps the greatest diaspora ever undertaken by humankind. Evidence for this has traditionally been inferred from associated material culture, language, and (more recently) by human genetics. Recently, however, new and important evidence for human migration in this region is being revealed by the study of wild, domestic, and commensal animals, deliberately or inadvertently dispersed by people, sometimes over great distances. Of these, perhaps the most notable have been recent studies of the mtDNA of ancient and modern Pacific rats and pigs, both of which have suggested a much greater complexity of human Holocene migration than is encompassed by current models. A technique newly applied within the field of zooarchaeology — outline analysis of molar teeth — has recently been used to begin to explore the origins and human mediated dispersal trajectories of these key commensal and domestic animals. In this paper, geometric morphometric techniques applied to Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) mandibular 1st molars (M1) from mainland S.E Asia to Eastern Polynesia, clearly reveal detailed and meaningful patterning in the distribution of dental morphotypes which must be linked to past dispersal events. They reveal clear "Lapita" and "Polynesian" signatures, specific dispersal trajectories, as well as evidence of multiple introductions to e.g., New Guinea, Hawai'i and even Easter Island.

The conventional model for the colonization of Samoa postulates initially colonization during the Lapita expansion ~2800 cal BP and continuous human occupation of the archipelago subsequently. We apply chronometric hygiene protocols to the pre-2000 cal BP dates for Samoa and find that there is a hiatus in the period ~2700-2400 cal BP. We argue that genetic and ceramic evidence support a discontinuous settlement model. Falsifiable expectations are derived from our alternative settlement model, and a field testing strategy is proposed.

Rapanui is one of the best known of the Pacific Island places, but its fame is for its natural setting (as a disaster zone), for its most remote island in the world status, and for its archaeological works. Many people may be forgiven for not knowing that there is a lively, contemporary population on Rapanui. The purpose of this panel is to explore aspects of Rapanui culture and society today and in the recent past, as well as to consider influences from the island's traditional history. Topics such as the anthropology and sociology of contemporary rapanui, contact history, Rapanui (i.e., "tiki") imagery in the world at large and the use of Rapanui as an image in contemporary debates are amongst the areas that would be most welcome. Prospective participants are encouraged to propose other themes and topics in the anthropology and traditional history of the "island at the end of the world", as one translation of Te Pito ote Henua has it.

I describe aspects of being young in a geographically isolated yet world-known place like Rapa Nui. More specifically, I explore how life experiences of a group young adult Rapa Nui can be coloured by spatiotemporal circumstances, while their practices within these structures can in turn influence what Rapa Nui becomes. The outcomes of this exploration will be tentatively analysed and compared to personal experiences, following the guide lines of Pierre Bourdieu's "participant objectivation" (Bourdieu 2003) and Lefevre's concept of "Third Space".

While archaeologists inherently focus on the past, linguistic, biological and cultural anthropologists can study either the past or present. Few of the so-called "mysteries" or "enigmas" of Rapa Nui remained unanswered. While there is continuing research on the rongorongo tablets, what caused the population decline and how the moai were moved, we now have a good idea of where the people came from, how the moai were constructed and what they represent. However, there is a noticeable lack of anthropological information regarding the modern Rapanui population, including their beliefs, economics, social stratification, impact of immigration, and population gene flow, cultural change, health and well-being. These and many other issues are prominent in the anthropological research of other Pacific islands but are almost absent for Rapa Nui. In this paper we examine past trends in the last fifteen years of research concerning Rapa Nui and suggest some ideas for future investigation.

Studies of Easter Island have predominantly sought to understand its archaeology through historical analysis. How the moai were created, constructed, and seen have been the subjects of research that has approached the stone figures within the island landscape. Yet, the moai have long held a popular appeal that has extended far into the cultural arenas of Western societies that have been drawn to fantasies of a detached and distant civilisation. Murder mysteries, alien visitors, time travel, and hidden treasure have been a part of the island through popular fictions that have depicted professors and archaeologists as both villains and heroes. Popular narratives have seen the island explored variously by "Indiana Jones", "Dr Who", and "Scooby Doo", with ancient tablets able to resurrect the moai, and the stone figures given the power to talk and walk. In this paper, I seek to understand the popular appeal of Easter Island and the moai in particular. Fiction films, cartoons, computer games, novels, and Marvel comic books will be central to this study. As will objects of material culture, which position miniature replicas of the moai as tissue box holders, glowing lamps, salt and pepper shakers, pieces in a board game, fruit machine symbols, and garden ornaments. It will be argued that the mythical appeal of the moai within popular and material culture reveals a number of factors: the myth of creation, the myth of movement, the myth of power, and the myth of presence.

As a personal Rapa Nui comment to the research project of Helene Martinsson-Wallin this paper will discuss questions concerning the possible existence of a collective "Rapa Nui identity", from the mythical past to the present. The questions range from speculative ideas such as whether even the first Polynesians settlers might have imagined the island as a unique place or what it can be that makes Rapa Nui so special in the eyes of both inhabitants and outsiders, to the contemporary problems of how to balance tourism with heritage management and locally lived experiences with global scientific expertise.

During research for a book focusing on the cultural impact of eighteenth century Pacific explorer texts that featured "Easter Island", one source I used for investigating the re-circulation of such books and images was eBay. Frequently my quest produced graphic texts of another kind, American comic books from 1940 to the present featuring moai, usually in situ on a wildly fantastical version of the island. Over the course of three years, through eBay and other web-based comic book re-circulation sites, I put together what is possibly the largest collection of English language "Easter Island" comics, 46 in all. This collection is now forming an important part of a project to examine the way moai and Rapa Nui have been taken up, mediated, presented, and received within American popular culture. My starting point is to identify what categories these comic images and narratives sort themselves into. With this in mind, I propose a slide show (Powerpoint), offering examples by category in order to deal with a number of key questions. What identities of Rapa Nui, the Rapanui and their moai are imagined by "the world at large" in such an "undisciplined" medium. How do these imagined identities mediate perceptions in this context? What kinds of cultural spaces are created by such imaginings? What is lost?

History has made an impression on all societies and cultures to varying extents, based on multiple factors. This is the case with museums, which are no longer a mere exhibition of artifacts dominated by aesthetic functions, but places of gathering where the local population can express cultural identity in different ways. A case study is the exhibit "He a'amu tupuna, he mana'u a mu'a", prepared for the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum of Rapa Nui. The exhibit aims to rescue the tales of the past through the voices of the elders, providing Rapanui a place to revive their traditions and to tell their own history in first person so that those tales last in time, enabling them to reach the young generation of the island. Set in five separate elements following a chronological order, the exhibit "He a'amu tupuna, he mana'u a mu'a" targets diverse goals such as the preservation of the Rapanui culture and the reinforcement of their identity as an indigenous group. The display allows for this identity to be expressed in different ways. Their history is told by the Rapanui themselves rather than by the writings bequeathed by the Europeans visitors to the island throughout many decades. Thus, the value of the exhibition rests more within the collective memory than in the heritage worth of the artifacts exposed, making of the museum a place of memory, a space where part of the own Rapanui identity is disclosed and where the singularities and richness of the cultural heritage of their people are in display.

The year 2007 marks two anniversaries: It has been five years since controversial Pacific scholar Thor Heyerdahl passed away, and 60 years since his provocative Kon-Tiki expedition successfully crossed the Pacific from South America to Polynesia. Much has happened during the intervals of both occasions and this paper will address, elucidate and update several aspects of Heyerdahl's perspective and legacy.

On June 2, 1914, Rapanui consultants working with Katherine Routledge of the Mana Expedition to Easter Island excavated from Orongo a basalt paenga adorned with a carved anthropomorphic face. Considered to be one of the expedition's prized objects, it was crated and stored at Mataveri for eventual removal from the island, and then disappeared. A long search for this important carving among museum and private collections was futile until 2006. This paper details the original discovery of the Orongo "doorpost", its archaeological history and ethnographic context, and tracks its path through the 1914 "native rising" into a private collection and thence into the Easter Island Statue Project archive. The role of the Orongo "doorpost" in comparative iconography, as well as in Rapanui entrepreneurship and political expression of the time, is examined.

During the last 285 years the community and territory of Rapa Nui have experienced dramatic sociopolitical, economic and structural changes. A complex and irreversible process of acculturation continues today. This paper discusses changes that are transforming the scientific research and the cultural patrimony into a "commodity" and are modifying the directions of current and future scientific work on the island, heightening their role in processes of construction of cultural identity. Conflicts between organizations, individuals and groups of interest are strongly focusing in the archaeology, which is increasingly seen as a unique source of monetary resources, power and influence. Researchers, developers or political agents and a growing number of visitors roam the island. More than ever before, these join an increasing number of islanders who raise their personal or instrumental views of the past and project them in the community to influence the present and to design the future. The oral traditions, the archaeological data, and historic documents are scrutinized and interpreted time and time again to sustain external or internal sociopolitical or economic aims. We put under discussion the idea that is required of the scientists to examine the implications of the fact that the archaeological or historicist reconstructions of the past of Rapa Nui are defied by this extraordinary revisionism that paradoxically nourishes and is contributing to the foundation of a "new cultural identity".

A brief history of the scholarships funded by the Easter Island Foundation and the Wiegand Family Memorial Scholarship will be given. The program began in 2002 and continues to award scholarships to Rapanui youth studying at the university level and in graduate school. The program has been very successful to date and hopes to raise additional funding for more awards. A short personal history of each scholarship recipient will be given. Highlights will include the recipients' educational goals, career choices, and how these will be interrelated on Easter Island.

The video, in English with subtitles, explores contemporary issues of identity and autonomy on Rapanui, interview mainly, but not exclusively, the Rapanui themselves, recorded on the island itself. At once a very personal and a scholarly documentary, narrated by the film maker and related to his published article on the topic.

This session highlights recent research in East Polynesia from the marginal islands and archipelagos of Hawai'i, Marquesas, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa, to the central archipelagos of the Cooks, Tuamotus, Society Islands and others. Presenters will outline the results of recent research and discuss broad theoretical implications in domains such as the development of sociopolitical complexity, interaction and exchange, population relatedness, environmental change, and human competition. Potential speakers are welcome to discuss these themes and others with the session organisers.

Nearly 70 years ago Edwin Burrows delineated a cultural boundary between East and West Polynesia. This paper reviews archaeological, oral-historical, and linguistic evidence for contact across this border and explores the archaeological utility of conceptualizing a boundary between East and West.

In this paper we give an overview of the chronological evidence from four field seasons of excavating marae sites on Huahine, in the Leeward group of the Society Islands. We also briefly discuss our findings in light of earlier work, mainly done on the islands of the Windward group. Since the beginning of scientific research in Polynesia it has been assumed that the Society Islands marae complex developed early. This may not be the case, and it is possible that these temple sites did not play an important part in Society Islands religious practices or socio-political structure until after AD 1500.

The cultural relatedness of Polynesian populations is exhibited through similarities in ceremonial architecture across multiple island groups. While many archaeologists and ethnologists have proposed specific cultural connections between the architectural traditions of different islands, there has been no quantitative analysis of homologous similarities in ceremonial architecture across Polynesia. In this paper I present a cladistic analysis of Polynesian ceremonial architecture from islands in West Polynesia, the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, Rapa Nui, and Hawai'i. Cladistics arranges classes into a branching hierarchy based on the distribution of derived (i.e., more recent) and ancestral characters across those classes. The results of the cladistic architectural analysis document new patterns of cultural relatedness among the islands of Polynesia.

space(s) are constructed upon comparative linguistics and comparative ethnography, as well as archaeological data. Consensus seems to be on a conceptual development of ritual space in Ancestral Polynesian Societies. The malae and marae / ahu / heiau complexes of ethnographical Polynesia are seen as variations of a common theme. In this paper I present an alternative model based upon only archaeological data. What evidence is there for ritual activity or religious architecture in excavations of early sites in East Polynesia? Based upon the archaeological evidence alone, when would we say that the classic Polynesian ahu / marae / malae complex developed? And, did it spread across this area with settler voyages, or at a later time?

The fishhooks represent one of the best evidence on fishing in prehistoric Polynesian societies. These archaeological artefacts are numerous but rarely analysed with a global perspective: what kind of fish is it used for? Which processes are involved? When and where did the fishermen use it? These questions are closely connected with the human subsistence system developed on these remote islands. What part did the fishing activities represent? We attempt to answer these questions through the study of two sites which yielded a great number of well-preserved fishhooks, combined with fish remains: the Manihina dune (Ua Huka, Marquesas islands) and Tangatatau rockshelter (Mangaia, Cook islands). The typological study of the artefacts, the fish bones analysis and an ethnologic study about Ua Huka and Nuku Hiva fishing traditions can give us information on the link between the gear and the fishes and shed light on one part of the ancient Polynesian fishing.

Research on Rapa Nui community patterning has lacked a theoretical framework for understanding the evolution of social organization and group formation. Despite widespread recording of the spatial distribution of surface remains across large sections of the island, many fundamental questions regarding the scale of community organization remain unresolved. Recent theoretical advances in the evolution of organization demonstrate that multi-level selection is an appropriate model for distinguishing the scale of community interactions and understanding the evolution of "complex" social organization. However, measuring organizational structure requires the development of appropriate archaeological units for linking the theoretical stipulations of the model to the empirical record. Here we outline the use of a multi-level selection framework using a case study from the Northwest and South coasts of Rapa Nui. Documenting community organization will ultimately facilitate a better understanding of the development of competition, cooperation, and megalithic construction on the island.

Manihina is a costal site on Ua Huka Island, in Marquesas archipelago (French Polynesia), and has been so far excavated during one evaluation and three archaeological campaigns. Its main features are a laying-out of the sand dune with stone slabs, few paepae pavements and many human and non-human inhumations: Around 40 burials concern human of both sexes and all ages, and there are also 10 pigs and 2 dogs. One of the human skeletons gave a radiocarbone date circa mid-15th century cal. AD. An archaeo-anthropological analysis of the burials leads to distinguish many different funerary practices in the site: Simple individual inhumation; use of coffin, canoe-coffin or stone covering; re-opening of burial for supplementary individual; body preparation such as mummification or limited disarticulation after partial decay; intentional post-disposal modification including skull taking; multi-stage burial including complete disarticulated secondary burial. Probably related to the status of the deceased, some of those practices are not documented in the previous archaeological data from the Marquesas and many are not clearly attested in the ethnological record from the early European observations. The question is also the link between those different practices because some of them can be seen as different phases of the same burial rite; in that view, the nature of the "final burial" for ancient Marquesans can be questioned.

This session will explore the current evidence and develop model in explaining past social and economic interactions within the western Pacific. Although exchange and social systems from the ethnographic present is often used in modelling the past, it can be shown that this regions past is unique with the present systems being the endpoint of thousand of years of change. We invite papers from archaeologists working in the western Pacific who wish to explore this theme of identifying and modelling the nature of past interactions in the colonisation and subsequent development of the western Pacific.

Archaeological excavations from a recent road project on Rota in the Northern Marianas have documented prehistoric activity in nine site complexes of solution caves and rock shelters distributed across a majority of the physiographic zones on this island. These results provide a unique overview of cave and shelter use extending from second century AD Pre-Latte occupation up until the early historic period. Site use features include evidence of both temporary and more intensive / permanent occupation, artifact production, burials and rock art. A majority of shelter activity dates to the Latte Period with a trend towards more extensive and intensive site use after c. 1200 AD suggesting expansion into more marginal locations at this time. There also appears to be a contrast in the nature of site use between larger bedrock outcrop shelters and more ubiquitous small boulder overhang shelters. The collective results from Rota can be used as a baseline for inter-island comparisons in order to develop a general model for cave / shelter use in the Marianas as a whole. This has relevance for understanding patterns of interaction within the archipelago and aspects of Latte Period expansion in particular.

The proto-historic Tongan Maritime Empire is well known to Pacific archaeologists. Less well understood is the role of Samoa as a regional player. Since the first anthropological work in Samoa in the 1920s, Tutuila has been known as a center of basalt tool manufacture. The last decade has seen a doubling of the number of lithic sites, with several now securely dated. This paper reviews the evidence for large-scale basalt tool manufacturing on Tutuila and the geographical and temporal spread of those tools in the southwest Pacific. Linguistic, oral historical, and archaeological evidence are mustered to argue that Samoa was a dominant regional influence prior to the rise of Tonga as a regional power.

This paper will consider how we might reconcile issues of scale in our attempts to describe and explain processes of colonization which must have involved interaction with existing populations. It will range models of diaspora focused on human-scale social processes against dispersalist scenarios that rest on large-scale biogeographical dynamics to determine if both can be accommodated by the empirical evidence to hand.

This paper will present the evolutions of the interaction-spheres developed by the traditional communities of New Caledonia over their nearly 3000 years of pre-European chronology. Archaeological studies have identified major changes in the flow of material exchanged, the direction of the exchanges and the distances traveled by the items depending on the period studied. In the first settlement phase related to Lapita, a common cultural background and low population density favoured regular interactions between related communities. The progressive diversification of cultural traditions over the first millennium of settlement highlights the appearance of distinct cultural entities over the archipelago, with the breakdown of some earlier interaction routes. During the first millennium AD, the archaeological data signals a clear isolation process between the main islands, allowing for the rise of localized traditions. This is followed during the second millennium AD by a new development of archipelago-wide interactions, in directions unrelated to those at play 1,000 years before. The paper will present these differences over time and discuss their overall significance in our modeling of Melanesian interactions.

The ethnographic picture of the richly tattooed Polynesians has been seen by some as an expression of a decorative treatment inspired by designs on Lapita pottery from more than 2,500 years ago. This view rests both on perceived design resemblances and an implied connection between the act of tattooing on skin and dentate stamping on pottery. The carriage of complex designs over such a long time span can be doubted when no intermediate ceramic wares are found between its early manifestation and the purported resemblance in tattoo recorded ethnographically. The evidence for tattoo alone is hard to find in the archaeological record, but what little evidence there is suggests a more complicated story. The simple operational parallel between decorating pottery with toothed stamps and human skin with multi-pronged needles can be examined in a wider context to include the distributional range of techniques used for tattooing within the southwest Pacific as recorded ethnographically. The hypothesis of the relationship between Lapita designs and tattoo has not been convincingly tested in any study. This paper aims to address the question of tattooing technology and Lapita stamped decoration.

As a part of the research initiative: Globalisation in the past and the present — a Joint Anthropological-Archaeological Research Project in Manus Papua New Guinea, initiated by Professor Helle Vandkilde — a team of eight persons, archaeologists and anthropologist from Aarhus University went to do fieldwork in the Manus Province and its surrounding islands Baluan, and Mbuke. After a season of fieldwork in the Manus Region (Mbuke and Baluan) this paper is a presentation of the results reached so far. A number of finds among others a rare prehistoric skeleton and its find context is being presented. Also features from an open-area settlement site is being presented.