The Tangatatau Rockshelter (site MAN‐44, Mangaia, Cook Islands) has produced one of Eastern Polynesia's most comprehensive chrono‐stratigraphic sequences of artifacts, vertebrate and invertebrate fauna, and botanical materials. Two seasons of excavation exposed 29 m2 out of an estimated total floor area of 225 m2. A suite of 30 radiocarbon age determinations indicates that human use of the shelter spanned the period from ca. 1000 to 1700 cal AD. This paper outlines the major temporal trends in the artifact, faunal, and paleoethnobotanical assemblages recovered from the site, and discusses these in terms of the development of classic Mangaian society, an exemplar of Polynesian ‘Open’ chiefdoms.

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For the most part the Pleistocene, and even the earliest post-glacial, is a blank when it comes to evidence of humans eating plants. No wonder the old men's stories, of chaps who hunt great mammals and eat their meat, still dominate our unthinking visions of hunter-gathering in that period. Some real evidence, slight though it is, from a classic European Upper Palaeolithic site provides a more balanced view.