Settlement and Subsistence in the Remote Western Pacific: Archaeological and Radiocarbon Data from Alamagan, Northern Mariana Islands

ABSTRACT

Small, remote islands were marginal environments for prehistoric human populations. We report archaeological and radiocarbon data from Alamagan, a small and isolated island in the northern part of the Mariana Islands archipelago. Challenging environmental conditions, including rugged terrain, active or recent volcanism, and uncertain freshwater availability posed significant challenges for permanent settlement throughout the Northern Islands. The Alamagan archaeological investigations documented 14 megalithic domestic structures, or latte sets, as well as isolated and non-portable Latte Period artifacts, and one historical site. Test excavations were undertaken at two of the latte features. These investigations add to a growing body of data suggesting colonization of the Northern Islands during the middle part of the Latte Period (probably during the late a.d. 1200s or early 1300s). We consider the implications of these data for the study of human adaptations to marginal insular environments in the Pacific.

KEYWORDS:

• Mariana Islands
• radiocarbon dates
• colonization
• subsistence
• island archaeology
• Micronesia

Acknowledgments

We are enormously grateful to Judith Amesbury of Micronesian Archaeological Research Services in Guam for encouraging us to undertake this research and for providing contacts. We are also thankful to the NOAA Pacific Islands Fishery Science Center (PIFSC) and Chief Scientist, Dr. Erin Oleson, for allowing us to join its scientific staff on the Oscar Elton Sette for transport to and from Alamagan. Permits from the CNMI Bureau of Environmental and Coastal Quality and the Division of Fish and Wildlife enabled our research. Alamagan’s two residents at the time of our investigations, Richard Santos and Jordan Pangelinan, kindly shared their information about the island and its history, and we will certainly always remember their friendship and the local delicacies they provided at the dinner table. Importantly, we must mention John Castro, a resident of Saipan who assisted Athens on Pagan in 2008, for helping with our landing on Alamagan and especially for taking the time to explain to Richard and Jordan who we were and what we wanted to do on their island. Further, Athens and Leppard would like to acknowledge International Archaeological Research Institute, Inc., for covering logistical costs and personnel time for the project. Leppard’s post-field research was supported by a Renfrew Fellowship jointly held between the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Homerton College, University of Cambridge.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributors

Stephen Athens (Ph.D. 1978, University of New Mexico) is a Senior Archaeologist at International Archaeological Research Institute, Inc. (IARII) and at International Archaeology, LLC (IA). He has served as IARII’s General Manager since 1986 and Manager of IA since 2014. He has held an Affiliate Faculty appointment at the Dept. of Anthropology, University of Hawaii, since 1987. The research of Dr. Athens has focused on the development of complex societies; human impacts to the environment; climate, vegetation, and landscape changes; the origin of maize cultivation in the northern Andes of South America; and the chronology of initial human settlement on Pacific islands. Besides research, Dr. Athens has also been involved in cultural resources management studies throughout his career, seeking to bridge the gap between pure research and historic preservation compliance requirements, believing they are actually different sides of the same coin and that one does not stand without the other.

Thomas P. Leppard (Ph.D. 2013, Brown University) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University. After a brief stint living and working in Micronesia, he held postdoctoral positions at Rutgers University and subsequently at the University of Cambridge, where he was appointed to the inaugural Renfrew Fellowship in Archaeology. He is primarily interested in the transition from non-hierarchical to hierarchical human communities, the pathways along which this transition was achieved, and variability in forms of Holocene social organization. More specifically, his research addresses the (somewhat counter-intuitive) emergence of social complexity in environments which might be expected to discourage such emergence, particularly on islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Pacific. Other interests include: hominin dispersal (especially the “Palaeolithic seafaring” question); geospatial analysis; survey archaeology; and palaeoenvironments/human ecodynamics.

ORCID

Thomas P. Leppard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4803-4061