Figure 11 - uploaded by Patrick Nunn
Content may be subject to copyright.
5 Photo of part of the Lapita site at Bourewa, Viti Levu Island, Fiji, following its excavation in February 2008. The earliest Lapita occupation was in stilt houses along an underwater sand spit on the top of which a shell midden accumulated. The higher sea level meant that there was a tidal inlet (or brackish-water lagoon) on the landward side of this sand spit. One wonders why the adjacent hills were apparently eschewed by the Lapita people for settlement.
Similar publications
Citations
... D. Part of the complex of 93 artificial islands at Nan Madol, off the southeast coast of Pohnpei Island, Micronesia, that was built around 1000 years ago and housed a number of megalithic structures/buildings as shown (photo: Patrick Nunn). (Jamero et al., 2017), so that water at high tide might wash beneath them (Fig. 1C), a tradition that may date back millennia in the southwest Pacific (Nunn and Heorake, 2009). ...
Owing to their high shoreline-to-land-area ratios, islands are especially sensitive to coastal change and their inhabitants especially vulnerable to associated impacts. In places along island coasts where shoreline recession is particularly noticeable and/or its impacts most severe, perhaps because adjacent population densities are unusually high, a common response has been to build a seawall. While this solution may appear instinctively correct, studies suggest otherwise, even to the point where seawall construction, particularly outside urban areas, might be considered maladaptive – neither solving the intended problem in the short-term nor helping coastal peoples cope effectively with longer-term shoreline change. Seawall construction can be viewed as part of a broader group of maladaptive solutions that are uncritically embraced by island peoples who may judge the efficacy of these solutions by their success in (wealthier) continental or urban contexts. More effective and sustainable approaches involve nature-based solutions in the short term and planning for transformative responses involving relocation in the longer term.
... In this paper, we report on a virtually identical Lapita site location on Kavewa Island, again strategically situated in a small island context with critical passage through the Cakaulevu Barrier Reef. Unlike Vorovoro, however, Kavewa Island incorporates both logistics and a resource-rich environment, as argued for by Nunn and Heorake (2009). The Kavewa and Vorovoro Lapita sites facilitate a preliminary discussion of Lapita colonisation and occupation of Vanua Levu. ...
... BP (Burley 2012:9), as well as the presence of Kutau-Bao obsidian (Ross-Sheppard et al. 2013), Vorovoro has been interpreted as a founder colony. Without ecological advantage for settlement in the sense of Nunn and Heorake (2009), its location had to be strategic, a settlement easily accessed via Mali Passage and one central to further exploration during Early Lapita colonisation (Burley 2012:10-11). ...
... In one such documented example, the first settlement of Remote Pacific Oceania occurred when people at 1500 BC in the Mariana Islands targeted a narrow range of seashore niches that no longer existed just a few centuries later, due to changing sea level and coastal ecology, resulting eventually in today's broad coastal plains and beaches becoming entirely disconnected from the original paleo-landscapes (Carson 2011(Carson , 2014a(Carson , 2014bCarson and Hung 2015). In other Remote Oceanic islands such as Fiji and New Caledonia in the central Pacific, the founding populations at 1000 BC lived in paleo-seashores that should not be conflated with modern-day settings (Nunn and Heorake 2009), contrary to the continued practice of surface-guided archaeological surveys. In a more extreme case, the migration routes of the first people entering the Americas prior to 12,000 BC, during the last ice age, need to be reframed in their paleo-landscape parameters (e.g., Anderson and Bissett 2015;Clark, Mitrovica, and Alder 2014;Faught and Gusick 2011;Madsen 2015). ...
Paleo-landscape investigations contextualize how people have inhabited and coevolved dynamically with their landforms, resource zones, and social-ecological niches during measured time intervals and through extended chronological sequences. Toward illustrating this research potential, changing paleo-landscapes 2500–1500 BC reveal the ancient conditions of the places where people lived in both Taiwan and the northern Philippines, in this case exploring what transpired there during a critical time period that heralded deep transformation of the language history, cultural heritage, economic production, and population demography of Island Southeast Asia as known today. During the time range of interest, the region’s coastlines and habitat configurations were substantially different from today’s circumstances, prior to change in sea level, accelerated slope erosion, lowland sedimentary buildup, and some of the world’s most rapid recorded tectonic uplift. The results show that people in eastern Taiwan at 2200–2000 BC faced a crisis of limited suitable landforms for their particular mode of subsistence economy, thus instigating overseas migration to the northern Philippines as a means to expand into other territories, with continued effects through 1500 BC and thereafter. © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
... The process that explains both the timing and choice of Lapita site locations in Remote Oceania is largely unknown or, perhaps more accurately, untested. Aside from a focus on small islands and beach ridges with reef resources (Dickinson, 2014;Lepofsky, 1988;Nunn and Heorake, 2009), it is not clear whether groups privileged coastlines that provided arable land or whether groups instead focused on areas with easily exploited marine resources (Burley, 2012). It is also possible that initial settlements were chosen to be easily accessible to other archipelagos or islands (Hunt, 1988) or that settlement decisions were influenced by rapidly filled niches, such that later arrivals had to settle in less desirable locations (Kennett et al., 2006). ...
The timing and choice of initial settlement location are examined on the small island of Tavua in Fiji’s Mamanuca Group. The mid- to late-Holocene sea-level retreat influenced the island’s coastal landforms through the acceleration of coastal progradation and the production of habitable land. Archaeological, sedimentological, and chronological data are integrated to better understand the island’s settlement and geomorphological history. These datasets are then compared with regional and modeled sea-level curves for Fiji in order to constrain the time period for the onset of coastal regression. The results indicate that Tavua was initially settled around 3000 years ago, within a few centuries of the formation of the coastal plain. Integrating archaeological, sedimentological, and sea-level datasets helps produce a more precise understanding of the relationship between sea-level change and the timing of settlement on small islands in Oceania.
... Most colonizing Lapita settlements were established on coastal fringes, perhaps on sandspits or sand-floored reef flats. As relative sea level fell and sediment accreted, these areas emerged inducing changes in settlement character and distribution (Nunn and Heorake, 2009). It is also clear that around 1300 AD, there was a rapid fall in relative sea level of 70-80 cm that induced food shortages in coastal areas across the Pacific Islands region and led to an abandonment of coastal settlements in favor of upland fortified settlements (Nunn, 2007b;Field and Lape, 2010). ...
... The first people to settle these islands selected places where access to reef and lagoon resources was optimal (Nunn and Heorake, 2009) and often built stilt houses out across shallow water flats (Green, 2003;Kirch, 1997;Nunn, 2009a), a reflection of the overriding importance of foods gleaned from nearshore ecosystems to their subsistence. Yet as the Early Period progressed, sea levels fell further, stressing some important ecosystems and probably causing the extinction (or extirpation) of some key foods. ...
Societies that develop on islands in oceans, distant from continental shores and one another, are unusually vulnerable to fundamental change (collapse). It is argued that a common cause of such change is the effect of external (climate-driven) environmental forcing on food resources, especially those on which coastal-dwelling island peoples invariably depend. Relative changes in sea level that were comparatively rapid are implicated in several instances of societal collapse on islands; two examples are discussed.
The first refers to western tropical Pacific Island groups in which Early Period societies are distinctive, representing periods of human settlement beginning 3,500–2,800 years ago and undergoing major transformative change a few centuries later. The end of these Early Period societies appears to have been near-synchronous, an observation requiring an external and region-wide driver rather than local drivers. Sea-level fall, which began 4,000–3,000 years ago in this region, continued for some centuries and is considered to have dropped below a critical threshold about 2,570 years ago, abruptly reducing useful coastal bioproductivity and forcing the inhabitants of these islands to sharply reduce their dependence on coastal foods.
Second is the effect of sea-level fall during the AD 1300 Event (approximately AD 1250–1350) that rapidly reduced coastal food availability and resulted in conflict that forced human groups throughout the higher islands of the tropical Pacific to abandon coastal settlements in favour of those in defensible locations inland, upslope and offshore. On lower islands (atolls), people made use of islands newly formed as a result of the sea-level fall during the ad 1300 Event, while some islands were abandoned by people altogether.
External environmental change, particularly sea-level change, has demonstrated potential to force fundamental alterations to island societies and even cause their collapse. This situation remains the same in today’s more globalised island world, where some islands are likely to become uninhabitable within a few decades as a result of sea-level rise, while on others deleterious impacts on coastal food systems are likely to force coastal peoples to seek new ways of feeding themselves.
... Its location at the first place (along a west to east route) where the broad barrier reef off the Mamanuca Islands in the western part of the archipelago first meets land has been argued as making it a likely location for an early settlement in Fiji (Nunn 2007). In addition, as elsewhere in the Lapita realm, it may be that a small (reef-fringed) island off a larger island was the preferred site configuration for Lapita colonizers (Spriggs 1984;Specht 2007;Nunn & Heorake 2009). ...
Two upland sites from the Vatia Peninsula, northern Viti Levu Island, Fiji, were excavated as part of a larger project investigating the settlement history of this area. These sites represent the first intensive survey and excavation program in this part of Fiji. The sites are a cave (Matanigaga), which acted as a short-term shelter, and a ring-wall mound (Drautana), one of a number of similar sites interpreted as likely precursors to complex ridge-top fortifications. Both sites suggest that occupation in this area began in the last millennium and involved exploitation of near shore marine resources. The number of fortified hilltops on the Vatia Peninsula suggests that conflict may have been endemic in this area of Fiji during the latter part of the last millennium. Site descriptions and the analysis of ceramic, lithic, and mollusk remains are presented here.
... When people first sailed east from the western Pacific rim 3500-3250 calBP (1550-1300 BC) to colonize the Marianas Islands in the northwest Pacific (Hung et al., 2011) and Solomon Islands and other groups in the southwest Pacific (Denham et al., 2012), most appear to have subsisted largely from marine foods, settling places along island coasts that were optimally configured for foraging from broad fringing coral reefs (Nunn & Heorake, 2009). The earliest known dates for human settlement in various west Pacific island groups all fall within the period of (late) Holocene sea level fall, which continued throughout the earliest discrete period of settlement ( Figure 2). ...
As in the past, most Pacific Island people live today along island coasts and subsist largely on foods
available both onshore and offshore. On at least two occasions in the 3500 years that Pacific Islands
have been settled, sea level changes affected coastal bioproductivity to the extent that island
societies were transformed in consequence. Over the past 200 years, sea level has been rising along
most Pacific Island coasts causing loss of productive land through direct inundation (flooding),
shoreline erosion and groundwater salinization. Responses have been largely uninformed, many
unsuccessful. By the year 2100, sea level may be 1.2 m higher than today. Together with other
climate-linked changes and unsustainable human pressures on coastal zones, this will pose huge
challenges for livelihoods. There is an urgent need for effective and sustainable adaptation of
livelihoods to prepare for future sea level rise in the Pacific Islands region. There are also lessons to
be learned from past failures, including the need for adaptive solutions that are environmentally
and culturally appropriate, and those which appropriate decision makers are empowered to design
and implement. Around the middle of the twenty-first century, traditional coastal livelihoods are
likely to be difficult to sustain, so people in the region will need alternative food production
systems. Within the next 20–30 years, it is likely that many coastal settlements will need to be
relocated, partly or wholly. There are advantages in anticipating these needs and planning for them
sooner rather than later. In many ways, the historical and modern Pacific will end within the next
few decades. There will be fundamental irreversible changes in island geography, settlement
patterns, subsistence systems, societies and economic development, forced by sea level rise and
other factors.
... In support of this, there is little material evidence of conflict (warfare) in the tropical Pacific Islands during the Medieval Warm Period and, in The reasons why more settlements are not known from Stage 1 is partly because there has been no systematic search for these but also because subsequent coastal sedimentation, especially from the large Ba River, has effectively obscured all trace of many of these settlements. This is of particular concern on the larger islands of the Pacific where sediment loads of large rivers have increased markedly in the past few hundred years as a result of unprecedentedly rapid land-use changes in their upper parts (Nunn 2005;Nunn and Heorake 2009). ...
... For the Lapita people were largely marine foragers who had little interest (at least at first in Fiji and Tonga) in agriculture, so eschewed river deltas and lowland river valleys in favour of coastal sites that adjoined broad productive coral reefs (Nunn 2007c;Burley and Dickinson 2001). So today, Lapita settlement sites are comparatively easy to find in many island groups because they were located in less-dynamic coastal settings, especially on smaller offshore islands (Nunn and Heorake 2009). In contrast, later-period sites in many island groups are often difficult to locate and challenging to convincingly reconstruct because they were often located in more dynamic coastal settings, a reflection of the desire of their inhabitants to exploit fertile alluvial soils around large-river mouths for agriculture (Clark and Anderson 2009a). ...
This paper reports preliminary findings of a study in northern Viti Levu Island (Fiji) intended to test the model of the AD 1300 Event. This holds that around AD 1250-1350, during the transition between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, there was a rapid climate-driven sea-level fall of 70-80 cm which created a food crisis for coastal dwellers throughout the tropical Pacific Islands and led to conflict and the abandonment of open coastal settlements in favour of those in more defensible locations. Two main areas were targeted – the Ba River Valley and adjoining Vatia Peninsula (plus offshore islands) – and inland/offshore sites in defensible locations, particularly in caves, ridge-top rockshelters, and isolated hilltops, were surveyed and test excavations made. Results show that while some of these sites were established during the AD 1300 Event, most were established shortly afterwards, which is exactly what the model predicts. It is concluded that prehistoric populations in Fiji (and similar island groups) were affected by the food crisis during the AD 1300 Event and did respond in ways that profoundly and enduringly altered contemporary trajectories of societal evolution.
This study has great implications for the preservation of the record of prehistoric settlement in Fiji (and other tropical Pacific Island groups) because as a consequence of this climate-forced migration from coasts to inland/upland sites, large amounts of sediment were released from island interiors and carried to their coasts where they buried earlier settlements or redistributed their material signature. Since European arrival in such places around 150 years ago, a second wave of coastal sedimentation, largely driven by plantation agriculture development had similar effects. The current rise of sea level around Pacific Island coasts is the latest in a series of (largely human) threats to the preservation of their cultural heritage.
... There was easy access by canoe in the shelter of the islands and likely access to a mangrove swamp to leeward . Coastal progradation has since left the site around 100 metres inland, but no uplift is needed to explain the post-Lapita landscape change–only a drop in sea level of around 1.2 m and an increase in sedimentation from the occupation of the island interior (Nunn & Heorake 2009). ...
This paper brings up-to-date a report by S. Best of initial excavations at Naigani in 1981 (Best 1981). The results of subsequent fieldwork in 2000 include the excavation and dating of Lapita-age ovens associated with early settlement and extinct palaeofauna. These include the giant megapode (Megavitiornis altirostris), a species of Ducula pigeon, the giant iguana (Lapitiguana impensa), and probably the endemic crocodile (Volia athollandersoni). The Lapita site of Vl 21/5 dates from 900 Bc and represents an initial colonising settlement within the Fiji Islands. The period of occupation ended around 750 Bc. The significance of Naigani is considered in terms of chronology, ceramic history, economy, extinctions, origins and interactions.
