The Archaeology of Island Colonization

ABSTRACTAccurately dating when people first colonized new areas is vital for understanding the pace of past cultural and environmental changes, including questions of mobility, human impacts and human responses to climate change. Establishing effective chronologies of these events requires the synthesis of multiple radiocarbon (14C) dates. Various “chronometric hygiene” protocols have been used to refine 14C dating of island colonization, but they can discard up to 95% of available 14C dates leaving very small datasets for further analysis. Despite their foundation in sound theory, without independent tests we cannot know if these protocols are apt, too strict or too lax. In Iceland, an ice core-dated tephrochronology of the archaeology of first settlement enables us to evaluate the accuracy of 14C chronologies. This approach demonstrated that the inclusion of a wider range of 14C samples in Bayesian models improves the precision, but does not affect the model outcome. Therefore, based on our assessments, we advocate a new protocol that works with a much wider range of samples and where outlying 14C dates are systematically disqualified using Bayesian Outlier Models. We show that this approach can produce robust termini ante quos for colonization events and may be usefully applied elsewhere.

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A demographic test of accidental versus intentional island colonization by Pleistocene humans

Journal of Human Evolution ◽

10.1016/j.jhevol.2020.102839 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 145 ◽

pp. 102839 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Yasuo Ihara ◽

Kazunobu Ikeya ◽

Atsushi Nobayashi ◽

Yosuke Kaifu

Keyword(s):

Island Colonization

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New Evidence from the East Polynesian Gateway: Substantive and Methodological Results from Aitutaki, Southern Cook Islands

Radiocarbon ◽

10.1017/s0033822200043095 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 49 (3) ◽

pp. 1163-1179 ◽

Cited By ~ 48

Author(s):

Melinda S Allen ◽

Rod Wallace

Keyword(s):

New Age ◽

Tropical Pacific ◽

Human Settlements ◽

Radiocarbon Dates ◽

Cook Islands ◽

Island Colonization ◽

Settlement Period ◽

Biological Evidence ◽

New Evidence

East Polynesia was the geographic terminus of prehistoric human expansion across the globe and the southern Cook Islands, the first archipelago west of Samoa, a gateway to this region. Fourteen new radiocarbon dates from one of the oldest human settlements in this archipelago, the Ureia site (AIT-10) on Aitutaki Island, now indicate occupation from cal AD 1225–1430 (1σ), nearly 300 yr later than previously suggested. Although now among the most securely dated central East Polynesian sites, the new age estimate for Ureia places it outside the settlement period of either the long or short chronology models. The new dates have, however, led to a comfortable fit with the Ureia biological evidence, which suggests not a virgin landscape, but a highly a modified fauna and flora. The results also provide the first systematic demonstration of inbuilt age in tropical Pacific trees, a finding that may explain widely divergent 14C results from several early East Polynesian sites and has implications for the dating of both island colonization and subsequent intra-island dispersals.

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