Refining Earliest Settlement in Remote Oceania: Renewed Archaeological Investigation at Unai Bapot, Saipan

ABSTRACT

Renewed archaeological investigation at Unai Bapot in Saipan refines the documentation of chronological change during the earliest period of human occupation of the Mariana Islands. First site use was in the range of 1600 to 1420 BC, and site abandonment occurred shortly after AD 1670. In more than 2 m of continuous stratigraphy, abundant examples of pottery occur in stratigraphic order in seven distinct occupation layers with minor internal variations. Other artifacts include shell and coral pendants, polished chert and shell adzes, various types of flaked stones and shells, fishhooks, and other objects. Faunal materials are almost entirely shellfish remains, and changes in shellfish taxa reflect a drop in sea level and associated habitat transformation in the first millennium BC. The new data support a refined substantive evaluation of the role of early Marianas settlement as the first human colonization in Remote Oceania.

Keywords:

• archaeology
• prehistory
• Austronesian settlement
• Saipan
• Mariana Islands

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author conducted this work with field assistant Patrick O’Day as part of Project 200441 for International Archaeological Research Institute, Inc. (IARII) under contract to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Division of Historic Preservation (CNMI-DHP). David J. Welch was the principal investigator for IARII. CNMI-DHP assisted with vegetation clearing and field screening. John Mark Joseph, Genevieve Cabrera, and Epi Cabrera represented cultural resource management concerns for CNMI-DHP. William R. Dickinson performed petrographic analysis of a sample of potsherds, and he also provided crucial information about sea-level change and site formation. David W. Steadman identified the non-human vertebrate faunal remains. Fiona Petchey offered much appreciated assistance with marine calibration and reservoir correction for radiocarbon dates. J. Stephen Athens, Lon Bulgrin, and Christophe Descantes provided useful comments on an earlier manuscript draft. Peer reviewers Robert Blust, Brian Butler, Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, and John Peterson offered critical comments that improved this work. Journal editors Jon Erlandson and Scott Fitzpatrick are thanked for their efforts with this manuscript. The author retains responsibility for the facts and interpretations presented.

Notes

*Calibrations are by OxCal (Bronk Ramsey 2001).

**For charcoal dates, the 2004 terrestrial calibration curve is used (Reimer et al. 2004).

***For marine shell dates, the 2004 marine calibration curve (Hughen et al. 2004) is used, with a local reservoir correction (ΔR) of 75 ± 35 years BP (Fiona Petchey, personal communication 2006), pooling the recommended value of 19 ± 50 for Guam (online database; see Reimer and Reimer 2001) with a recalculated value of 132 ± 50 for another specimen from Guam (Athens 1986:113).