Two issues long debated among Pacific and American prehistorians are ( i ) whether there was a pre-Columbian introduction of chicken ( Gallus gallus ) to the Americas and ( ii ) whether Polynesian contact with South America might be identified archaeologically, through the recovery of remains of unquestionable Polynesian origin. We present a radiocarbon date and an ancient DNA sequence from a single chicken bone recovered from the archaeological site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula, Chile. These results not only provide firm evidence for the pre-Columbian introduction of chickens to the Americas, but strongly suggest that it was a Polynesian introduction.

the last twenty years has seen an apparent consensus that the immediate origins of Polynesian language, culture and biology lie solely with the lapita peoples and cultures that settled Samoa and tonga by 2700 years ago. We suggest that there is increasing evidence that does not sit well with this generally accepted view of Polynesian origins and thus we put forward an alternative model for consideration. Building on Green's suggestion of over 20 years ago, we propose that some of the ideas in his triple-I model (Green 1991a) might also be usefully applied to conceptualizing the processes involved in Polynesian origins. Specifically, we suggest that in addition to lapita origins, there were significant later elements introduced to Polynesia that were fundamental to the development of Polynesian culture and biology prior to the settlement of East Polynesia. Current data suggest that some of these elements are shared with Micronesia and may be ultimately derived from post-lapita population movements, perhaps from Island Southeast Asia through the low islands of the Carolines, Kiribati and tuvalu to West Polynesia.

Although minor climatic and sea-level changes have been documented for the South Pacific during the late Holocene, our understanding of the consequent impact of these changes on the marine 14 C reservoir, and therefore the 14 C content of shellfish, is limited. Ultimately, this has implications for documenting the chronology of human movement and adaptation in this region. In this paper we compare marine reservoir (DR) data obtained from tightly controlled archaeological proveniences with known-age, pre-AD 1950 shells from the southern Cook Islands, American Samoa, and Marquesas Islands. Results indicate that there has been no significant change in the near-shore marine reservoir in these three locations over the last ca. 750 years. Furthermore, known-age, pre-AD 1950 shell samples provide more precise DR values for use in sample calibration than archaeological paired shell/charcoal samples. This is attributed in part to the limitations of assigning provenance and age to material from archaeological sites. On the basis of these results we conclude that the known-age, pre-AD 1950 shell derived DR values can be used to calibrate shell 14 C results from deposits of late Holocene age.

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