The maritime transport of prehistoric megaliths in Micronesia

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines Micronesian examples of megalithic transport, focusing particularly on the ocean transport of the famous stone money disks quarried in Palau by Yapese Islanders and moved back to Yap prior to European contact. Using a combination of climatic, oceanographic, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological data, we examine the maritime technologies that the Yapese could have used to transport stone money across several hundred kilometres of open‐ocean and offer hypotheses to show how this might have been accomplished using bamboo rafts, canoes and rafts towed by fishing canoes.

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