Landscapes have been fundamental to the human experience world-wide and throughout time, yet how did we as human beings evolve or co-evolve with our landscapes? By answering this question, we can understand our place in the complex, ever-changing world that we inhabit. This book guides readers on a journey through the concurrent processes of change in an integrated natural-cultural history of a landscape. While outlining the general principles for global application, a richly illustrated case is offered through the Mariana Islands in the northwest tropical Pacific and furthermore situated in a larger Asia-Pacific context for a full comprehension of landscape evolution at variable scales. The author examines what happened during the first time when human beings encountered the world’s Remote Oceanic environment in the Mariana Islands about 3500 years ago, followed by a continuous sequence of changing sea level, climate, water resources, forest composition, human population growth, and social dynamics. This book provides a high-resolution and long-term view of the complexities of landscape evolution that affect all of us today.
The Ritidian Site in Guam reveals the full scope of traditional cultural heritage in the Mariana Islands since 1500 B.C. The material records here have been incorporated into a cohesive narrative in chronological order to learn about the profound heritage of this special site and its larger research contributions.
"The essential source for scholarly reassessment of the Asia-Pacific region's diverse and significant archaeology and history."--James P. Delgado, coauthor of The Maritime Landscape of the Isthmus of Panama "Underpins a nuanced picture of Asia-Pacific that shows how the activities of the Chinese and Japanese in East Asia, the spread of Islam from South Asia, and the efforts of the Iberians and especially the Spanish from southern Europe ushered in a world of complex interaction and rapid and often profound change in local, regional, and wider cultural patterns."--Ian Lilley, editor of Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands The history of Asia-Pacific since 1500 has traditionally been told with Europe as the main player ushering in a globalized, capitalist world. But these volumes help decentralize that global history, revealing that preexisting trade networks and local authorities influenced the region before and long after Europeans arrived. In the volume The Southwest Pacific and Oceanian Regions, case studies from Alofi, Vanuatu, the Marianas, Hawaii, Guam, and Taiwan compare the development of colonialism across different islands. Contributors discuss human settlement before the arrival of Dutch, French, British, and Spanish explorers, tracing major exchange routes that were active as early as the tenth century. They highlight rarely examined sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters between indigenous populations and Europeans and draw attention to how cross-cultural interaction impacted the local peoples of Oceania. The volume The Asia-Pacific Region looks at colonialism in the Philippines, China, Japan, and Vietnam, emphasizing the robust trans-regional networks that existed before European contact. Southeast Asia had long been influenced by Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traders in ways that helped build the region's ethnic and political divisions. Essays show the complexity and significance of maritime trade during European colonization by investigating galleon wrecks in Manila, Japan's porcelain exports, and Spanish coins discovered off China's coast. Packed with archaeological and historical evidence from both land and underwater sites, impressive in geographical scope, and featuring perspectives of scholars from many different countries and traditions, these volumes illuminate the often misunderstood nature of early colonialism in Asia-Pacific.
On June 15, 1944, Afetna Point was called ‘Yellow Beach 2’ by the U.S. Marines and Army infantry braving Japanese resistance to establish a beachhead before capturing As Lito airfield in the following days. After 75 years, this book presents archaeological evidence, archival records, and respected elders’ accounts from WWII.
When James Boswell famously lamented the irrationality of war in 1777, he noted the universality of conflict across history and across space – even reaching what he described as the gentle and benign southern ocean nations. This volume discusses archaeological evidence of conflict from those southern oceans, from Palau and Guam, to Australia, Vanuatu and Tonga, the Marquesas, Easter Island and New Zealand. The evidence for conflict and warfare encompasses defensive earthworks on Palau, fortifications on Tonga, and intricate pa sites in New Zealand. It reports evidence of reciprocal sacrifice to appease deities in several island nations, and skirmishes and smaller scale conflicts, including in Easter Island. This volume traces aspects of colonial-era conflict in Australia and frontier battles in Vanuatu, and discusses depictions of World War II materiel in the rock art of Arnhem Land. Among the causes and motives discussed in these papers are pressure on resources, the ebb and flow of significant climate events, and the significant association of conflict with culture contact. The volume, necessarily selective, eclectic and wide-ranging, includes an incisive introduction that situates the evidence persuasively in the broader scholarship addressing the history of human warfare.
Archaeological investigations at the Chamorro village at Afetna Point on the southwest coast of Saipan yielded Latte Period burials, ceramics, stone and shell tools, microfossils from food remains, and charcoal from cooking features dating between A.D. 1450 and 1700.
This book integrates a region-wide chronological narrative of the archaeology of Pacific Oceania. How and why did this vast sea of islands, covering nearly one-third of the world’s surface, come to be inhabited over the last several millennia, transcending significant change in ecology, demography, and society? What can any or all of the thousands of islands offer as ideal model systems toward comprehending globally significant issues of human-environment relations and coping with changing circumstances of natural and cultural history? A new synthesis of Pacific Oceanic archaeology addresses these questions, based largely on the author’s investigations throughout the diverse region.
The Ritidian Site is located in the United States island territory of Guam, the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. The site holds a data-rich 3500-year record of natural and cultural history of the islands, now uniquely preserved and open for public access in the Ritidian Unit of Guam National Wildlife Refuge. The place means many things for people in different perspectives, together speaking volumes of Ritidan's powerful effects as a heritage landscape. Today, Ritidian is known as an archaeological site, as a place where important historical events occurred, as a home of preserved forest habitat, as a spiritual retreat, as an example of land-ownership struggles in Guam, and as much more. While research is ongoing, this book offers a summary update of findings by scholars who have studied different aspects of the profundity and complexity of Ritidian's integrated natural-cultural landscape history.
