Clark, Geoffrey; Wright, Duncan
Description
The prehistory of Palau and other parts of western
Micronesia has recently become important to debates
about the colonisation and pattern of cultural
development in the west Pacific. The main reason for this
has been the suggestion that the antiquity of human
occupation there might be much earlier than has been
thought (e.g. Masse 1990), ilnd well before the dispersal of
Lapita culture from the Bismarck Archipelago to Samo,1,
between 3300 and 2850 BP (Specht and Gosden 1998;
Anderson...[Show more] and Clark 1999). Estimates for the settlement of
the Marianas now start about -1800 years BP, with Palau
occupied at 4500 BP and Yap probably before 3200 BP
(Dodson <rnd Intoh 1999; Wickler 2001). These older than
anticipated dates (e.g. Milsse 1990) are significant because
they coincide approxunately with the spreild of a
eolithic cultural complex in island South East Asia
chilracterised by use of rice, pig and dog, manufacture of
red-slipped or paddle-impressed cernmics, along with
other distinctive portable artefacts that do not occur in
pre-ceramic assemblc1ges of the region (Bellwood 2001 ).
Direct evidence for the earliest settlement of the
Marianas, Palau and Y<1p is, however, scarce, and has
been largely inferred from the analysis of sediment cores
which indicates anthropogenic activity eilrlier than the
archaeological record In Palau these include the presence
of charcoal particles, pollen from food plants like the
giant swamp taro (Cyrtosperma clw111isso11is), and an
increase in savannah plants at the expense of forest
growth before 4000 BP (Athens and Ward 2001; Welch
2001). While the palaeoenv1ronmental results have
furnished useful alternate colonisation chronologies there
is a striking absence of early sites that allow us to identify
either the origin and pattern of settlement m west
Micronesia, or to investigate the colonisers' connection to
early Austronesian movements in Island South East Asia
and the Lapita dispersal in Near and Remote Oceania.
This paper summarises recent investigations undertaken
on the islands of Angaur and Ulong (Fig. l) aimed at
recovering early cultural materials from Palau's sequence
to clarify the archipelago's colonisation history. The
earliest securely d,1ted and adequately reported cultural
deposits from Palau date to rn. 2300 BP (Welch 2001), and
several reasons for an absence of sites older than 2500 BP
have been proposed.
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