Tromp, MonicaMatisoo-Smith, ElizabethKinaston, RebeccaBedford, StuartSpriggs, MatthewBuckley, Hallie R.2020-08-132397-3374http://hdl.handle.net/1885/207468Remote Oceania, which largely consists of islands covered in tropical forests, was the last region on earth to be successfully colonized by humans, beginning 3,000 years ago. We examined human dental calculus from burials in an ancient Lapita culture cemetery to gain insight into the early settlement of this previously untouched tropical environment, specifically on the island of Efate in Vanuatu. Dental calculus is an ideal material to analyse questions of human and plant interactions due to the ingestion of plant-derived microparticles that become incorporated into the calculus as it forms throughout a person's life. Most of the microparticles identified here are from tree and shrub resources, including a ~2,900 calibrated (cal) bp example of banana in Remote Oceania, providing direct evidence for the importance of forests and arboriculture during the settlement of Remote Oceania.The research presented here was funded by a University of Otago Doctoral Scholarship, a Royal Society of New Zealand Skinner Fund grant and an Otago Centre for Electron Microscopy Student Research Award awarded to M.T. Funding of the project was provided by the Australian Research Council (grant no. DP 0556874), the National Geographic Society (grant no. SRC 8038–06), the Pacific Biological Foundation, the Department of Archaeology and Natural History and School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the ANU, the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation Foundation and B. Powell.application/pdfen-AU© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2020202010.1038/s41562-019-0808-y2021-12-02