Settlement of Pacific Research Paper

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When Captain James Cook discovered Christmas Island, at he very center of the Pacific Ocean, in 1777, he wrote that there was no trace of any people having been there before him. He was mistaken, for his men had seen some rats, which must have been introduced by humans, and subsequent research shows that Polynesians had colonized Christmas Island five hundred years before its European discovery. In fact, archaeological evidence shows that most of the approximately 1,500 habitable Pacific islands had been settled by about 1000 CE in a series of migrations that required the longest ocean passages prior to the voyages of European exploration in the fifteenth century. The development of long-distance seafaring, the consequent pattern of island colonization, and the impact of people on long-isolated and fragile environments are issues of significance to world history.

Stretching across one-third of the earth’s surface, the Pacific Ocean is vast, varied, and scattered, with perhaps 25,000 islands of all types and sizes, most of them in a wide tropical belt that extends southeast from Indonesia to Easter Island. They were settled in two broad phases of migration. The large islands of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, and the Solomons constitute “Near Oceania,” and they were first settled during the Late Pleistocene. The generally small islands of Micronesia, eastern Melanesia (Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji), and Polynesia (all the islands in the triangle with vertices at Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand), are known collectively as “Remote Oceania” and were settled first during the Late Holocene.

Pleistocene Migration and Holocene Developments

As sea levels were 120 meters lower in 25,000 BCE, today’s Southeast Asian islands as far east as Bali and Borneo, and also Taiwan and Japan, were then attached by dry land to the Asian mainland and inhabited by large placental mammals, including elephants, deer, pigs, and people. Australia and New Guinea, however, formed a separate landmass, known as Sahul, which supported an ancient biota characterized by its marsupial mammals. Between them lay the island-studded sea of the mixed-biotic province of Wallacea. It is possible that some islands, notably Flores, had been reached by the Javan population of Homo erectus, which dates to 1.0–1.8 million years ago, but archaeological data suggest initial colonization of Sulawesi, Maluku, Timor, and the Philippines in the period 50,000–35,000 BCE. By 45,000 BCE, Sahul had also been colonized. The migrant populations were undoubtedly Homo sapiens, and their modern descendants, such as Australian aboriginals and Highland New Guineans, retain genetic markers that link them to the early diaspora of our species from its African homeland.

Pleistocene maritime technology is entirely unknown. However, as Homo erectus was tied almost entirely to dry land migration, even the modest dispersal of early Homo sapiens across Wallacea appears significant by contrast. Natural rafts of giant-bamboo clumps and other materials are quite common in the region and may have been used more by our species than earlier hominids to cross estuaries and lagoons, so that over many thousands of years the chance movement of small breeding units over distances of up to 170 kilometers, as was required to reach Australia, seems possible. At the other extreme from this proposition is the view that invention of formal watercraft, such as canoes and shaped rafts, and even of sailing technology, can be attributed to Pleistocene populations. There is evidence that not only people, but also some useful animals, such as possums and small wallabies, were introduced to new islands as early as 35,000 BCE, and that obsidian tools were being taken from New Britain to New Ireland by 20,000 BCE. Whatever the case, it is in1portant to observe that the maximum achieved passage length remained at about 200 kilometers throughout the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Seafaring may have become more frequent with time, but it did not become more extensive or efficient until the Late Holocene.

By 9,000- 6000 BCE, rising sea levels had divided the Sahul landmass into New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania, and the isolated populations followed different cultural traject01ies thereafter, within exclusively foraging societies in the latter two regions. In New Guinea, however, there is evidence of the early development of agriculture. Research at the Kuk site, at 1,600 meters altitude in the Wahgi Valley, shows that by the Early Holocene (c. 8,000 BCE) , there was systematic exploitation of pandanus (screw pine) and banana, and by 5000 BCE, formal garden mounds and drainage ditches were being constructed. These were probably for cultivation of taro, sugarcane, and bananas, all of which seem to have been domesticated in New Guinea, along with yams and breadfruit.

By the Late Holocene, around 2000 BCE, gardening was probably widespread in New Guinea, and possibly the Solomon Islands, and both the existence of ground-stone adzes suitable for carpentry and evidence of the frequent movement of obsidian around the New Guinea islands indicate that canoes or other ocean-going watercraft existed. In the event, however, it was external influences that were instrumental in propelling the Late Holocene phase of maritime migration.

Settlement in Remote Oceania

Archaeological evidence shows that about 1300- 1200 BCE, the older aceramic cultures of the New Guinea islands, notably of the Bismarcks, were largely replaced by a material culture that included pottery, polished stone adzes and chisels, slate and shell tools, and distinctive ornaments and fishhooks. While at least some of these elements have a long history in the New Guinea region, including shell adzes, shell beads, and simple fishhooks, ceramics were new, and the distinctive red-slipped, dentate-stamped types can be traced to earlier sites in Southeast Asia. In turn, these represent the expansion, after about 2500 BCE, of a Neolithic culture that had its origins around 5000 BCE in South China. This involved the cultivation of rice and millet and the husbandry of pigs, dogs, and chickens.

Cereal cultivation never reached the New Guinea region or anywhere else in Oceania, but the domestic animals and ceramic culture did, and they were probably associated with gardening of taro, bananas, breadfruit, and other crops. Linguistic and genetic data show that this was not just a case of cultural diffusion. There was also substantial migration. People of Southeast Asian ancestry moved into coastal New Guinea and on to its smaller islands and intermarried with the resident people. The immigrant languages of the Austronesian family prevailed, and it was this culturally mixed population that began the second great phase of Pacific settlement.

Between 1000 and 800 BCE, there was a rapid migration from the New Guinea islands southeast to Vanuatu and New Caledonia and east to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. Taken from the name of an early site in New Caledonia, this is known as Lapita culture. At some point, not necessarily at the beginning, it introduced the pig, dog, and chicken, and almost certainly also the cultivation of root and tree crops, into the remote Pacific islands. As obsidian from New Britain is found as far east as Fiji and decorative styles on Lapita pottery changed synchronously, there was either repeated migration or some degree of interaction throughout the region. Lapita was contemporaneous with movement of a similar ceramic culture into western Micronesia, and both represent the beginning of long-distance seafaring in the Pacific. Equally importantly, from Lapita onward eastward migration in Remote Oceania was into islands where hitherto a few species of bats were the highest form of terrestrial mammalian life.

Seafaring and Colonization

A sudden and six fold increase (to 1,200 kilometers) in voyaging range at about 1000 BCE indicates the advent in the Pacific of the sail, first recorded in China and Egypt by 3000 BCE, and probably also of shaped paddles used for both propulsion and steering, and the development, with vessel controllability, of rudimentary stellar navigation. The evolution of voyaging technology thereafter has been one of the most important issues in the settlement history of Remote Oceania. The traditional view, espoused by the historian Peter Buck, was that early colonists used large, fast, double-hulled canoes that were capable of sailing into the prevailing southeast trade winds. Based on that assumption, modern voyaging researchers, such as Ben Finney, have worked with indigenous seafarers to build substantial double-hulled canoes, notably Hokule’a, and sail them around the Pacific to demonstrate the voyaging skills of ancient Polynesians. The performance data gained in these practical experiments were then used in computer simulations, which suggested probable patterns of early maritime migration. The conclusions of this neotraditional research were that voyaging capabilities were sufficiently sophisticated that no part of Oceania remained beyond reach, so that the overall pattern of colonization was broadly continuous from west to east; Lapita colonization reached as far east as Samoa at about 900 BCE, to the Cook Islands in East Polynesia by 500 BCE or earlier, and then throughout East Polynesia by 500 CE.

Recent chronological research in East Polynesia has cast doubt on this hypothesis. Key archaeological sites have provided significantly younger ages than existed in earlier data. For instance, the important Marquesan site—Ha’atuatua, Hane, and Anapua—once dated to about 1 CE are now dated no earlier than about 900 CE, and there are similar results from throughout East Polynesia. Consequently, the pattern of settlement history in Remote Oceania appears episodic rather than continuous, as follows:

a very rapid dispersal 1000–800 BCE of red-slipped pottery-using cultures, especially Lapita, into western Micronesia and from New Guinea to West Polynesia;
expansion into central Micronesia, probably from the Santa Cruz islands, and colonization of some islands marginal to the eastern Lapita expansion (Niue Pukapuka and Rotuma), about 200 BCE;
rapid, aceramic dispersal from West Polynesia into and through East Polynesia at 900–1100 CE; and
colonization around 800–600 CE of South Polynesia (New Zealand and outlying archipelagos).

Sailing Downwind

The punctuated pattern of settlement suggests that the assumed sophistication of seafaring in Remote Oceania needs to be reconsidered. So also do linguistic data that show that the term for “double canoe” did not occur before the development of Central Pacific languages, that is after the Lapita expansion, and that there were no terms for either “fixed mast” or “standing rigging.” Early migrations probably used outrigger canoes. In the western Pacific and Southeast Asia, these canoes had lateen rigs historically, but those may not have been introduced to Remote Oceania until about 1200 CE, through the influence of expanding Arabian seafaring technology. In the central and eastern Pacific, Oceanic spritsails were dominant historically, and the early form of these, found in New Zealand and probably the Marquesas, had no fixed mast or rigging. It consisted of two spars, with a triangular sail, apex down, and it was held up only by wind pressure against sheets held aft. Canoes using it sailed downwind because the absence of side-stays meant that winds on the beam would push the rig overboard. Since historical observations show that more complex rigs, including the lateen sail with its fixed mast, halyards, and balance boards, were only reaching the Central Pacific in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long after the colonization of East and South Polynesia, it can be hypothesized that the New Zealand rig was used throughout Remote Oceanic colonization.

Although quite simple, this rig could be repaired at sea and set in high- or low-aspect shapes. It avoided the massive stresses on gear, especially on fragile pandanus sails of windward sailing, and it could be demounted instantly in high winds or squalls. But sailing with this rig must have been relatively slow and highly dependent on fair winds. The question then arises of how the settlement of Remote Oceania was achieved by vessels that could not sail into the prevailing trade winds.

Westerly winds occur briefly but frequently so they cannot explain the long pauses in the colonizing sequence. However, there was also long-term variation in the frequency of westerly winds of El Nino origin. Proxy measures of the frequency and intensity of El Nino conditions, including long-term records of loess production in China, of changes in ocean circulation, and of sediment deposition in lakes, indicate that El Nino frequencies were unusually high about 3000 BCE, 1400–500 BCE, 400–900 CE, and 1100–1700 CE. Dispersal out of Southeast Asia, the Lapita expansion, and movement into East Polynesia approximate this pattern. They were all largely west-to-east movements. East-to-west movements into Central Micronesia and to South Polynesia occurred at intervening periods during the “normal” pattern of trade wind dominance. In summary, migration in Remote Oceania may have been restricted to downwind sailing at slow average speeds on long passages. Successful voyaging would have been significantly more difficult, with much lower rates of success than is envisaged in traditionalist and neotraditionalist hypotheses. It was probably undertaken uncommonly at times when winds were predominantly adverse, but occasional significant episodes of frequent wind reversals would have provided conditions that enhanced the probability of colonizing success toward the east.

Faunal Devastation

When colonists reached uninhabited islands, they broached ancient and fragile ecosystems with devastating results. The scale of the assault was realized as early as 1843 when remains of extinct giant birds (moa) were found in Maori middens. Evidence of anthropogenic change has continued to accumulate ever since. Extinction of terrestrial vertebrates is widely documented. Large flightless birds became extinct in Pleistocene New Ireland. The giant megapode, or brush fowl; a land crocodile, Mekosuchus inexpectatus; and a giant horned tortoise disappeared in New Caledonia, and the giant iguana and megapode in Tonga. Recent research shows that numerous species disappeared with the arrival of people in Fiji. These included another land crocodile, Volia athollandersoni; a giant iguana and tortoise; a giant frog; two large megapode species; another giant megapode, Megavitiornis altirostris; and a giant flightless pigeon, similar to the dodo. In New Zealand nearly forty species of birds, including thirteen species of moas, disappeared. This represents a 50 percent decline in the number of bird taxa (taxonomic groups) breeding on the mainland, and similar losses were sustained on Hawaii and elsewhere in East Polynesia, from the central archipelagos to the margins. Extinctions occurred rapidly, although perhaps not as quickly on large islands as the fifty years after human colonization preferred for moa extinction in one scenario. As well as extinction, there was also depletion and range contraction among other taxa. Some seal species occur in the earliest archaeological sites in subtropical Polynesia, but by the eighteenth century, they were found only in New Zealand, where their breeding ranges had contracted almost to the subantarctic under hunting pressure.

These data show that faunal collapse in Remote Oceania was rapid and early. The typical pattern is for remains of extinct taxa to be found in sites that date to the initial century or two of human settlement and thereafter to be absent. Extinction, at least among the larger-bodied taxa, was density-independent, that is, small human populations of widely varying density distribution could still devastate indigenous faunas very quickly. In addition, it is now clear that the process was virtually universal. So much so, that David Steadman estimates a loss of 8,000 species or populations within Oceania generally.

Deforestation

Profound changes also occurred in vegetation patterns. Forests retreated with the advent of people who wanted to create agricultural land and whose pigs, chickens, and rats foraged for seeds on the forest floor. In New Caledonia there was some loss of diversity in forest trees after 1000 BCE, and massive deforestation began by 500 BCE. On Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, substantial deforestation began about 100 BCE but earlier on the smaller islands. These data suggest that in the Lapita region, settled by 1000 BCE, there was relatively little initial impact on the landscape, but that massive changes in sediment distribution and vegetation patterns developed as population density increased and settlement expanded inland. Sediment from the hills was eroded into the valleys and redeposited around the coasts, increasing opportunities for agricultural development.

The pattern in the eastern area is less clear, largely because of uncertainty about the timing of initial human colonization. Aceramic East Polynesian archaeology lacks any horizon marker of initial colonization comparable to Lapita pottery. Apparently, anthropogenic landscape changes have been dated to 1500 BCE in Mangaia, Cook Islands, and to 500 CE in New Zealand, Easter Island, and the Societies, using samples from lake sediment cores, but the results are contentious. Recent research in New Zealand shows that lake sediments are often contaminated by in-washing of old soil carbon and that radiocarbon dates are therefore too old.

Landscape change in Remote Oceania appears, therefore, to divide into two patterns. In the large western islands, it was often slow to start and took up to a millennium to assume major proportions. This seems to be a density-dependent pattern that was tracking the progressive expansion of agriculture. In the eastern islands, there was a stronger early impact, probably reflecting the small size of many islands, their very steep slopes and relatively fragile soils, and increased climatic volatility in the second millennium CE.

Island Settlement

Settlement of the Pacific occurred in a series of maritime migrations that began during the Pleistocene and accelerated in frequency and range during the Late Holocene. The movement into and across Remote Oceania probably reflected improvements in maritime technology, the impetus of favorable climatic episodes for sailing, and the utility of agriculture for sustained island settlement. Fragile island environments were altered profoundly by human colonization. Yet, if extinction on Oceanic islands was catastrophic for biological diversity, exploitation of the abundant and naive fauna was also an optimal strategy of initial human survival on islands. Such an easy food supply allowed small colonizing populations to grow rapidly and avoid their own possible extinction as quickly as possible. Likewise, substantial deforestation and redeposition of upland sediments opened up the possibility of long-term demographic success by intensive agriculture. Significant anthropogenic environmental modification, in other words, underwrote the successful settlement of most Pacific islands.

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