Evolution of Polynesian bark cloth and factors influencing cultural change

The origin and dispersal of the first human inhabitants of the Polynesian Triangle have been studied from many perspectives and significant progress in our understanding of Polynesian prehistory has derived from an intermingling of linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. Contributions from the ethnographic record, however, have been limited by the dearth of comparative methods that are useful for reconstructing prehistory and identifying and analyzing cross-cultural trends. For more than fifty years, cladistic phylogenetic methods have been used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of biological systems from contemporary trait distributions. These rigorous methods are applied herein to reconstruct the prehistoric evolution and dispersal of Polynesian bark cloth, using ethnographic data recorded since European contact with Polynesian cultures. Contrary to expectation given the earlier settlement of Western Polynesia, the Eastern Polynesian bark cloth traditions retained many ancestral features. In contrast, a suite of innovations appear in the Western Polynesian bark cloth traditions and it is asserted herein that the distribution of these traits may be associated with the rise of the Tongan maritime Empire. Within Eastern Polynesia, the pattern of diversification of bark cloth traditions is consistent with the breakdown of interaction spheres late in the settlement era.     

On the Relative Isolation of a Micronesian Archipelago during the Historic Period: the Palau Case-Study

Contact between Europeans and Pacific Islanders beginning in the early 1500s was both accidental and intentional. Many factors played a role in determining when contacts occurred, but some islands remained virtually isolated from European influence for decades or even centuries. We use Palau as a case-study for examining why this archipelago was free from direct European contact until 1783, despite repeated attempts by the Spanish to reach it from both the Philippines and Guam. As computer simulations and historical records indicate, seasonally-unfavourable winds and currents account for the Spanish difficulty. This inadvertently spared Palauans from early Spanish missionaries, disease, and rapid cultural change.
© 2007 The Authors     

From Contentious to Contended: An ‘Event’‐ful Account of Karavaran History

In 2019, we returned to Karavar, one of Papua New Guinea's Duke of York Islands. Since our last visit 28 years earlier, many with whom we worked had died. However, their children knew about us and were eager for our recollections about the lives and times of their parents. We, in turn, wished to learn about current lives and times. Our conversations, thus, often focused on multi‐generational changes. Significantly, most Karavarans thought that these changes had been for the better. Indeed, they seemed relatively satisfied with their present circumstances. In contrast, the Karavarans we had earlier known were frequently fired up with grievance, disappointment, possibility, and occasional exultation. Here we consider how contentiousness turned into contentment; how, what Karavarans had been, approached what they wanted to be. In understanding this historical process, we consider several ramifying ‘events’: happenings that Karavarans recognized, whether immediately or in retrospect, as interrupting business as usual and, ultimately, as challenging assumptions about the workings of their world.     

Devolatilization‐induced pressure build‐up: Implications for reaction front movement and breccia pipe formation

Generation of fluids during metamorphism can significantly influence the fluid overpressure, and thus the fluid flow in metamorphic terrains. There is currently a large focus on developing numerical reactive transport models, and with it follows the need for analytical solutions to ensure correct numerical implementation. In this study, we derive both analytical and numerical solutions to reaction‐induced fluid overpressure, coupled to temperature and fluid flow out of the reacting front. All equations are derived from basic principles of conservation of mass, energy and momentum. We focus on contact metamorphism, where devolatilization reactions are particularly important owing to high thermal fluxes allowing large volumes of fluids to be rapidly generated. The analytical solutions reveal three key factors involved in the pressure build‐up: (i) The efficiency of the devolatilizing reaction front (pressure build‐up) relative to fluid flow (pressure relaxation), (ii) the reaction temperature relative to the available heat in the system and (iii) the feedback of overpressure on the reaction temperature as a function of the Clapeyron slope. Finally, we apply the model to two geological case scenarios. In the first case, we investigate the influence of fluid overpressure on the movement of the reaction front and show that it can slow down significantly and may even be terminated owing to increased effective reaction temperature. In the second case, the model is applied to constrain the conditions for fracturing and inferred breccia pipe formation in organic‐rich shales owing to methane generation in the contact aureole.     

Cultural geographies of the contact zone: Gaels,Gallsand overlapping territories in late medieval Ireland

In writing about the social and cultural geographies of the past, we frequently reinforce notions of difference by using neatly delineated ethnic terms of reference that often superscribe the complexities of reality on the ground. Referring to ‘Gaels’ and ‘Galls’, demarcating ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worlds in late medieval Ireland, is but one example. We often exaggerate, too, the boundedness of geographical space by speaking more of frontiers and less of overlapping territories. Using the context of late medieval Ireland, I propose in this paper the application and broadening of the concept of the contact zone—prevalent in postcolonial studies for a number of years—to address this specific issue of overstating social and cultural geographical cohesion and separation in the past. The use of the concept of the contact zone in geography has been largely confined to the modern period, which in the extant literature has received priority for various reasons, not least of which is the wider availability of source material. However, in this paper, I suggest that its relevance to the study of the medieval period is equally as strong, and perhaps its application can serve to deflect our imaginings of earlier geographical worlds as somehow more static and less complicated, and instead open the possibility of reading the fluidity and interconnections of the more distant past.     

Holocene prehistory of the northernmost north Pacific

We examine evidence for Holocene contact between Asia and North America across what is now the Bering Strait, emphasizing maritime adaptation. After 10,000 B.P. residual influence of the Siberian Paleolithic is clear, and derivative Americans were moving southward along the open Pacific coast and settling in the eastern Aleutian Islands. By 6000 B.P. maritime adaptation is evident in the Kodiak Island region, and expansion westward brought colonization of the entire Aleutian chain of islands before 3000 B.P. In Asia there was marine subsistence on Hokkaido by 6000 B.P, but in the lower Amur River region, the southern and northern regions of the Okhotsk Sea, the coast of Kamchatka, and the Chukchi Peninsula no major maritime interest can be dated until after 2700 or even 2500 B.P In north Alaska, the mainland was cut off from Siberia by 6000 B.P with the rise of postglacial seas, but contact was reestablished 5000 B.P at the cultural level of the nonmaritime Siberian Neolithic. Pronounced marine orientation appears intrusively in north Alaska somewhat before 3000 B.P, when the only known source for the technology was the region extending from the Gulf of Alaska through the Aleutian Islands. Thereafter developed the maritime culture of the historic Eskimo people.     

An archaeological test of the “Exchange Expansion Model” of contact era change on the Northwest Coast

Recent anthropological studies show that traditional views of indigenous communities in the wake of European colonialism are constrained by Eurocentric biases. These biases can be overcome, in part, by greater reliance on archaeological data as an independent line of evidence and increased attention to indigenous internal sociocultural processes. This study uses these strategies to examine colonial era shifts in indigenous exchange systems on the Northwest Coast of North America. Obsidian artifact data from late precontact and early postcontact deposits are used to test what I call the “Exchange Expansion Model” (EEM) of colonial period shifts in Northwest Coast exchange systems. According to the EEM, both the volume and geographic scope of supralocal exchange among indigenous communities increased as a result of European influences. This study tests the model using obsidian artifact data from three Lower Columbia River sites – Cathlapotle (45CL1), Clahclellah (45SA11), and Meier (35C05). The results support the hypothesized increase in volume, but not the hypothesized increase in geographic scope, of indigenous supralocal exchange. To explain the departure from expectations, I propose a revised version of the EEM which considers more fully how Native demography and internal sociocultural dynamics developed in the context of introduced diseases, horses, and the fur trade. I suggest these variables facilitated increases in the flow of prestige goods, but declines in the flow of less valued goods such as obsidian, from interior sources to the Lower Columbia River. Exchange alliances between Lower Columbia Chinookans and nearby Willamette Valley inhabitants were more resistant to disruption, so obsidian importation from the Willamette Valley to the Lower Columbia stabilized, and perhaps intensified, during the postcontact era. These findings illustrate the power of archaeology for empirically testing ethnohistorical models of colonialism and for illuminating the significance of indigenous internal sociocultural processes in colonial entanglements.     

Veiqati Vaka Viti and the Fiji Islands Elections in 1999

ABSTRACT

The question of demographic decline in the Marquesas Islands is here reinvestigated through an integrated approach to the particular case of Ua Huka. We first attempt to propose a new population estimate for the period prior to European contact, thanks to an archaeologically based method that relies on the length of sleeping areas available in the housing structures recorded in the valleys. From this estimate, we then use ethnohistorical accounts to reassess local demographic evolution throughout the 19th century. This leads us to partly nuance the impact of Westerners, especially the introduction of diseases, which on Ua Huka appears to have been less critical than other factors such as sociopolitical conditions, including intense warfare, linked to unfavourable environmental conditions.     

Cross-cultural contact in Manchuria: approaches to lives in between, 1900s–1950s*

ABSTRACT

This article aims to uncover the lives of some of the individuals who, through the occupational and personal choices they made, moved between the Chinese and Russian societies of Manchuria (Northeast China) in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese Eastern Railway, which passed through the region and was central to its economy, provided the main framework for Chinese–Russian contact. Headquartered in Harbin, the Railway generated a need for interpreters and translators, while it also offered opportunities for commercial go-betweens. Russian schools employed Chinese teachers for language instruction. After a change in the balance of power, by the 1920s, Manchurian warlords hired former tsarist officers and soldiers into their armies. The article compares the functions of intermediaries in this region to the better-known examples of Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. Research on ‘compradors’ has been more often conducted in these geographical settings, whereas the roles of cross-cultural intermediaries in late imperial and republican China still remain relatively unexplored.     

Looking Out to Look In: The Use of the Periphery in China's Geopolitical Narratives

Using a previous paper published in Eurasian Geography and Economics (Agnew, 2012) as a point of departure, an American geographer and specialist on China explores the role of the periphery (frontier, borderlands) in forging perceptions of China's place in the world. By presenting counter-narratives to the myth of a singular Chinese culture/ethnicity spreading inexorably from a Yellow River hearth region over five millennia, the author demonstrates how the Chinese have "looked out" (i.e., used a complex and seemingly alien frontier space) in order to "look in" (mark a "Chinese" identity as culturally homogeneous even when it was not). The paper examines how this process worked through time to repeatedly reinvent an unambiguous and knowable China from histories of intermixing, ambiguity, and spatial complexity. It contrasts a Mao-era perspective of a periphery marking the leading edge of an expanding and homogeneous Chinese culture with post-Mao and post-socialist narratives, which view the periphery more as a "contact zone" between China and its neighbors, where Han ethnicity and Chinese civilization alike are viewed as having absorbed external influences.