Geographical Influences on Settlement‐Location Choices by Initial Colonizers: a Case Study of the Fiji Islands

Patrick D. Nunn

28 citations0/0 files storedGeographical Research

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 Archaeology and ancient environmental studies Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

Abstract

Abstract From 3200 to 2850 cal BP (1250–900 BCE), the Lapita people of the Bismarck Archipelago (Papua New Guinea) undertook voyages eastward that led to their colonization of the eastern outer Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. The earliest (Lapita) settlements in Fiji were along the Rove Peninsula in southwest Viti Levu Island. At the time of colonization, sea level was 1.5 m higher than today. The Rove Peninsula was then a smaller island off the coast of larger Viti Levu, with a broad, fringing reef along its windward coasts, which was probably the main attraction for Lapita colonizers. As elsewhere during Lapita times in the western tropical Pacific Islands, settlement choice for the initial colonizers of the Fiji Islands was at one level driven by site access, at another by the presence of broad, fringing coral reefs suitable for marine foraging. The earliest settlement along the Rove Peninsula was at Bourewa, occupied first in 3050 cal BP (1100 BCE), where people lived in houses on stilt platforms built along the axis of a subtidal sand barrier; on one side was a broad coral reef, on the other a partly‐enclosed tidal inlet. There is no evidence that the Bourewa settlers practised horticulture or agriculture at this time, their subsistence being predominantly marine foraging. After some 300 years of following this subsistence strategy, the inhabitants of Bourewa responded to sea‐level fall and the arrival of cultivars (of taro and yam) by including horticulture. As sea level fell further, a total of 550 mm during the Lapita era, the tidal inlet dried up and marine‐food resources diminished to a point where the natural environment of the Rove Peninsula could no longer sustain its Lapita inhabitants. All Lapita sites in the area were abandoned about 2500 cal BP (550 BCE), at the same time as the Lapita culture, marked by the end of dentate‐pottery manufacture, came to an end in Fiji.

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 — 28 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 2001Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia 1984The history of the Fijian languages 1991Man and a half : essays in Pacific anthropology and ethnobiology in honour of Ralph Bulmer 1971Tonga, Lapita Pottery, and Polynesian Origins 2007Oceanic Explorations: Lapita and Western Pacific Settlement 1990Archaeology of the Lapita Cultural Complex: Critical Review.

Cited by

2013The end of the P acific? Effects of sea level rise on P acific I sland livelihoods 2014Precarious islands: Kulkalgal reef island settlement and high mobility across 700 km of seascape, central Torres Strait and northern Great Barrier Reef 2012Human‐Mediated Prehistoric Marine Extinction in the Tropical P acific? Understanding the Presence of H ippopus hippopus(Linn. 1758) in Ancient Shell Middens on the R ove P eninsula, Southwest V iti L evu I sland, F iji 2015Sea‐level fall implicated in profound societal change about 2570 cal yr bp (620 bc ) in western Pacific island groups

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.