Prehistoric Human Impacts to Marine Mollusks and Intertidal Ecosystems in the Pacific Islands

From long-term stratigraphic records in Pacific Island archaeological sites, researchers have documented alterations to molluskan species richness and abundance, decreases or increases in mollusk shell size and, in rare cases, human foraging may have contributed to the extirpation of mollusk taxa. Mollusks perform critical ecosystem functions in tropical intertidal environments, including improving water quality through filtration, regulating algal cover, and increasing habitat and substratum complexity through ecosystem engineering. These critical ecosystem functions can be negatively affected by human foraging, possibly contributing to decreased resilience of coral reefs to climatic alterations. We review modern ecological research on human impacts to mollusks and intertidal ecosystems that illustrates the mechanisms and effects of human foraging. We then examine centuries to millennial scale archaeological records from the Pacific Islands to understand long-term, time-averaged trends in human impacts to intertidal ecosystems.     

Spatiality and the Interpretation of Identity Formation: Fugitive Slave Community Creation in Nineteenth-Century Kenya

In the nineteenth century, the coalescence of a plantation economy on the Swahili Coast provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. Increasing numbers of enslaved workers fled inland, and, by the 1840s, some had created independent settlements. In Swahili, runaway slaves were known as watoro. Forged by men and women of diverse cultural backgrounds, watoro communities offer broad insight into how groups form and sustain themselves. This study explores how watoro settlement organization and landscape practices reflect the process of community formation. Particular attention is paid to watoro communities?? participation in regional networks and the degree to which fugitive slaves developed homogenized sociocultural norms or maintained long-term cultural plurality. This paper adopts a spatial archaeological approach centered on settlement location, housing density, and domestic architecture. Dissonances between these spatial data and artifact distributions reveal the ways in which both heterogeneity and homogeneity were expressed and experienced. Articulations and disarticulations between different evidentiary types also help to better reveal the diverse range of inter-group interactions that fugitive slaves pursued and avoided.     

Thorium-230 coral chronology of a late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdom

Documenting the history of settlement in Hawaii during the last few centuries before European contact, is crucial to charting the evolution of the most complex chiefdom in Polynesia. It is precisely this period that Hawaii, and many Polynesian societies, underwent their most rapid changes in political, economic and social organisation. The last ∼500 to 300 years in the ¹⁴C calibration curve is problematic with wide fluctuations often rendering large age spans that do not precisely date single events, especially troubling with a culture-historical record of ∼1000 years duration. Here we present an extremely high precision ²³⁰Th chronology for archaeologically constrained coral samples from a range of occupancy sites. Our high precision dates allow the time of site use to be clearly demonstrated. They also provide the first dates for habitation sites in Hawaii that clearly show contemporaneous occupation—the major problem in settlement pattern archaeology. We demonstrate that two sites were occupied within the same year. Our refined chronology, provides new and exciting opportunities for tracking sociopolitical and economic developments during the last few centuries—the crucial period in the evolution and transformation of Polynesian societies.     

Correlating archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records using a Bayesian approach: a case study from Sutton Common,South Yorkshire,England

This paper presents a case study aimed at correlating archaeological ‘events’ (obtained from radiocarbon measurements and dendrochronology) from the site of Sutton Common with a radiocarbon-dated pollen sequence obtained from a palaeochannel deposit adjacent to the area of the main archaeological activity. It demonstrates the use of a Bayesian approach to quantifying whether the timing of palynological ‘events’ interpreted as reflecting anthropogenic impacts are likely to be associated with archaeological ‘events’. The results suggest that Bronze Age activity in the form of a mortuary enclosure and associated cremation burials are probably not contemporary with the palynological evidence for disturbance to the oak–hazel woodland in this period. Subsequent evidence for local woodland clearance and agriculture is estimated to precede the construction of the large Iron Age enclosure in 372 BC, with increases in ‘anthropogenic indicators’ following this ‘event’. The construction of the site does not appear to have had a pronounced impact on the local vegetation, with hazel the only woody taxon to show clear reductions. Despite the use of a substantial number of oak timbers in the enclosure palisade, percentages of oak remain remarkably stable. Later farming activity on the site probably post-dates the end of activity in the enclosures. The value of the methodology is discussed in relation to quantifiable and robust correlations of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental narratives of landscape and human activity.