Settlement System and Landscape Dynamics: An Integrated Archaeological and Geomorphological Study

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With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Jeffrey Clark and Donald Schwert will lead a multidisciplinary team in research designed to address critical issues of human migration, colonization, and subsequent cultural development in the central Pacific. Undertaken from the perspective of human ecodynamics, this project is a case study of an island environment and its prehistoric human occupation that bears on larger questions of human-environment co-evolutionary relationships. Integrated archaeological, osteological, geomorphological, and pedological studies will investigate the complex, dynamic relationships between human populations and their environments on the island of Ofu, Manu'a Group, American Samoa. The project will provide tests of core elements of the conventional model of central Pacific prehistory and the origin of Polynesian peoples. The conventional model holds that the colonists of central Polynesia were Lapita peoples from islands to the west. "Lapita" refers to a people or group of peoples that shared a "cultural complex" for which a distinctive dentate-stamped pottery is diagnostic. Lapita colonizers came to the region perhaps 3000 BP and were farmers and fishers who relied heavily on exchange of valued resources between communities. Since Lapita populations were the first to arrive in the Central Pacific, they are regarded as ancestral to later Polynesian populations. Some researchers are increasingly calling this model into question on a set of issues, and Samoa is strategically situated in terms of both geographic location and previous research to allow for critical tests of those issues. Project investigations will be conducted at three locations on Ofu shown to possess, or hold potential for, early cultural deposits: Va'oto, Coconut Grove, and Ofu Village. Because landscape change influenced settlement systems, geomorphological modeling of the paleo-landscapes will be carried out in conjunction with excavations. The project has four objectives: 1) establish the time of human colonization; 2) construct and test models of the human settlement distribution; 3) test a set of models for landscape evolution; and 4) construct a model of the geomorphological dynamics of the Ofu coast. Each objective will be addressed through the testing of a set of hypotheses. The intellectual merit of the project lies in the intersection of archaeological, biological, geological, and pedological evidence to evaluate multiple working models of island colonization and subsequent adaptation. The overarching goal is to construct a new model of the human colonization and subsequent settlement system in the context of a changing environment during the first millennium BC. This model will have applicability to coastal environments on other islands throughout the central Pacific. The results of the research will make an important contribution to the understanding of Samoan and Polynesian prehistory, human prehistory and colonization impacts more generally, and human ecodynamics in the broadest sense. Through the conduct of "community archaeology," local community members will be engaged with the scientific team to create cultural heritage knowledge relevant for professional and local stakeholders, alike. The project will serve to educate graduate and undergraduate students from the US, American Samoa, and Independent Samoa, many of whom are from backgrounds underrepresented in the sciences.