We dedicatethis paper to our longstanding friend and colleague Dr Alan C. Ziegler, who passed away in 2003.We will sorely miss his characteristic wit, unfailing attention to detail and amazing expertisethat has so often assistedarchaeologists conducting Pacificfaunal studies.
AbstractDespite images of paradise, eastern Polynesian islands were devoid of most economically-useful animals and cultigens when colonised by humans about 1500 years ago; other views on chronology are more conservative. We analyse the faunal material from the 1959 excavations by Green in Mangareva, southeast Polynesia where 13,598 bones (NISP) were identified to nearest taxon. We discuss the significance of the purposely introduced chicken or Pacific Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus), dog (Canis familiaris) and pig (Sus scrofa) not known from the historic records of that island group as well as the Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) and humandental and skeletal material. The dog remains now represent the most eastern limit of this species known prehistorically for Oceania. Many of the pig remains were associated with a marae (religious edifice) confirming the importance of this animal in its ceremonies. The majority of fractured human bones and teeth were recovered from midden contexts, thus alluding to the possibility of cannibalism as reported in late prehistoric oral traditions. We suggest that rats, and not human predation, were responsible for the early local extinction of the chickenin the prehistoric sequence for Mangareva.Chicken, pigs, dogs, rats and, of course, people constitute the five main terrestrial animals transported in prehistory across Remote Oceania. On many islands, all five were present from the earliest times but, in some cases, one or more of these taxa went extinct during late prehistory. Andrew Sharp (1964:94-97) used the presence or absence of the pig, dog and chicken to bolster some of his arguments for accidental voyaging, but he drew mostly on the European contact ethnographic evidence with only limited data from the archaeological record. More recently, archaeology has considerably altered the record of humanlyintroduced animals for most of the island groups which he discussed. Moreover, it can now be shown that the transport of various animals to numerous islands of Near Oceania RCG:
Excavation in Largo-Gallina phase sites supports the interpretation that towers were primarily defensive structures. There is some evidence that towers also had a storage use. It is interesting to note that the use of defensive and specialized, village-wide storage structures coincides temporally with a period of environmental deterioration in the American Southwest.
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