Sustained prehistoric exploitation of a Marshall Islands fishery: ichthyoarchaeological approaches, marine resource use, and human-environment interactions on Ebon Atoll

Abstract

Atolls are often characterised in terms of the environmental constraints and challenges these landscapes impose on sustained habitation, including: nutrient-poor soils and salt laden winds that impede plant growth, lack of perennial surface fresh water, limited terrestrial biodiversity, and vulnerability to extreme weather events and inundation since most atolls are only 2-3 m above sea level. Yet, on Ebon Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands in eastern Micronesia, the oceanside and lagoonside intertidal marine environments are expansive, with the reef area four times larger than the land area, supporting a diverse range of taxa. Given the importance of finfish resources in the Pacific, and specifically Ebon, this provided an ideal context for evaluating methods and methodological approaches for conducting Pacific ichthyoarchaeological analyses, and based on this assessment, implement high resolution and globally recognised approaches to investigate the spatial and temporal variation in the Ebon marine fishery. Variability in landscape use, alterations in the range of taxa captured, archaeological proxies of past climate stability, and the comparability of archaeological and ecological datasets were considered. Utilising a historical ecology approach, this thesis provides an analysis of the exploitation of the Ebon marine fishery from initial settlement to the historic period-two millennia of continuous occupation.The thesis demonstrated the importance of implementing high resolution methods and methodologies when considering long-term human interactions with marine fisheries. Improving methods and data quality of Pacific fishing studies included using vertebral morphometrics for fish size reconstructions and the utilisation of all cranial and postcranial remains for taxonomic identifications. Spatial analysis of habitation sites spread across three islets representing the windward-leeward gradient indicated that marine environments local to each site were not influencing taxonomic composition, but the variability in richness and evenness identified is likely a reflection of fishing technology and site function. There was no indication of significant human impact to the inshore reef taxa, which may be a reflection of the flexible foraging strategies implemented and the resilience and structure of these marine environments. As such, the shifts in the relative abundance of skipjack (K. pelamis) in the archaeological sites were attributed to the potential influence of ENSO variability over the last two millennia.With the implementation of these comprehensive methods and the use of historical ecology as a conceptual framework the range of research questions that could be explored was expanded.Consequently, this thesis was able to address some of these questions, including: the identification of variability in foraging practices across small spatial scales, the usefulness of ichthyoarchaeological data for tracking environmental stability, and distinguishing between changes ii in resource availability and s...

A Partial Chronological Sequence of Human Habitation for Pingelap Atoll (Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia)

“…These data reflect marine fishing and foraging, as well as terrestrial introduction and management of western Pacific cultigens; comprehensive analysis will provide more detail. Most of the fish and molluscan taxa identified have also appeared in assemblages from elsewhere in the Federated States of Micronesia, such as on Fais in the Western Caroline Islands (Ono and Intoh 2011); on the Polynesian outliers of Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi (Leach and Davidson 1988;Davidson and Leach 1996); as well as on Ujae Atoll (Weisler 1999b), Ebon Atoll (Weisler 2001a;Lambrides 2017;Lambrides and Weisler 2018), Maloelap Atoll (Weisler 2001c), and Utrōk Atoll (Weisler 2001b) in the Marshall Islands; and also on Kiribati (Thomas 2007a(Thomas , 2007b.…”