New Evidence from the East Polynesian Gateway: Substantive and Methodological Results from Aitutaki, Southern Cook Islands

Melinda S. Allen · Rod Wallace

80 citations0/0 files storedRadiocarbon

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies Geology and Paleoclimatology Research Archaeology and ancient environmental studies

Abstract

East Polynesia was the geographic terminus of prehistoric human expansion across the globe and the southern Cook Islands, the first archipelago west of Samoa, a gateway to this region. Fourteen new radiocarbon dates from one of the oldest human settlements in this archipelago, the Ureia site (AIT-10) on Aitutaki Island, now indicate occupation from cal AD 1225–1430 (1σ), nearly 300 yr later than previously suggested. Although now among the most securely dated central East Polynesian sites, the new age estimate for Ureia places it outside the settlement period of either the long or short chronology models. The new dates have, however, led to a comfortable fit with the Ureia biological evidence, which suggests not a virgin landscape, but a highly a modified fauna and flora. The results also provide the first systematic demonstration of inbuilt age in tropical Pacific trees, a finding that may explain widely divergent 14C results from several early East Polynesian sites and has implications for the dating of both island colonization and subsequent intra-island dispersals.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 80 citations exist upstream.

References

2000On the road of the winds: an archaeological history of the Pacific Islands before European contact 1992The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific 2006Late Colonization of Easter Island 1993Late colonization of East Polynesia 2000Rapid Extinction of the Moas (Aves: Dinornithiformes): Model, Test, and Implications 1982Tikopia, the Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier 1983Tikopia. The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier 1994Palaeoenvironmental evidence for human colonization of remote Oceanic islands

Cited by

2016Marginalization of the Margins: The Importance of Smaller Islands in Human Prehistory 2009Dynamics of Polynesian Subsistence: Insights from Archaeofauna and Stable Isotope Studies, Aitutaki, Southern Cook Islands 2015The Chronology of Colonization in Remote Oceania 2019New dates for the Makekur (FOH) Lapita pottery site, Arawe Islands, New Britain, Papua New Guinea 2013Starch analysis reveals prehistoric plant translocations and shell tool use, Marquesas Islands, Polynesia

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.