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      Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions

      Journal of Archaeological Research
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC

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          Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat.

          The pristine island ecosystems of East Polynesia were among the last places on Earth settled by prehistoric people, and their colonization triggered a devastating transformation. Overhunting contributed to widespread faunal extinctions and the decline of marine megafauna, fires destroyed lowland forests, and the introduction of the omnivorous Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) led to a new wave of predation on the biota. East Polynesian islands preserve exceptionally detailed records of the initial prehistoric impacts on highly vulnerable ecosystems, but nearly all such studies are clouded by persistent controversies over the timing of initial human colonization, which has resulted in proposed settlement chronologies varying from approximately 200 B.C. to 1000 A.D. or younger. Such differences underpin radically divergent interpretations of human dispersal from West Polynesia and of ecological and social transformation in East Polynesia and ultimately obfuscate the timing and patterns of this process. Using New Zealand as an example, we provide a reliable approach for accurately dating initial human colonization on Pacific islands by radiocarbon dating the arrival of the Pacific rat. Radiocarbon dates on distinctive rat-gnawed seeds and rat bones show that the Pacific rat was introduced to both main islands of New Zealand approximately 1280 A.D., a millennium later than previously assumed. This matches with the earliest-dated archaeological sites, human-induced faunal extinctions, and deforestation, implying there was no long period of invisibility in either the archaeological or palaeoecological records.
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            Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia

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              Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology

              Archaeology is poised to play a pivotal role in the reconfiguration of historical anthropology. Archaeology provides not only a temporal baseline that spans both prehistory and history, but the means to study the material remains of ethnic laborers in pluralistic colonial communities who are poorly represented in written accounts. Taken together, archaeology is ideally suited for examining the multicultural roots of modern América. But before archaeology’s full potential to contribute to culture contact studies can be realized, we must address several systemic problems resulting from the separation of “prehistoric” and “historical” archaeology into distinct subfields. In this paper, I examine the implications of increasing temporal/regional specialization in archaeology on (1) the use of historical documents in archaeological research, (2) the study of long-term culture change, and (3) the implementation of pan-regional comparative analyses.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal of Archaeological Research
                J Archaeol Res
                Springer Science and Business Media LLC
                1059-0161
                1573-7756
                December 2016
                February 23 2016
                December 2016
                : 24
                : 4
                : 325-372
                Article
                10.1007/s10814-016-9092-9
                b465b54b-9d63-46eb-993f-2cf3732711a1
                © 2016

                http://www.springer.com/tdm

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