Archaeology of Pacific Oceania, now in its second edition, offers a state-of-the-art and fully detailed chronological narrative of how Pacific Oceania came to be inhabited over a long time scale, posing fundamental questions both for Pacific Oceania and for global archaeology.
The Pacific Ocean covers 165 million sq. km, nearly one-third of the world’s total surface area, yet its thousands of islands and their diverse cultural histories are scarcely known to the other two-thirds of the world. This book asks how and why did this vast sea of islands come to be inhabited over the last several millennia, transcending significant change in ecology, demography, and society? What were the roles of overseas contacts in the development of social networks, economic trade, and population dynamics? What can any or all of the thousands of islands offer as ideal model systems for comprehending globally significant issues of human-environment relations and coping with changing circumstances of natural and cultural history? What do the island archaeology records reveal about coastal setting as part of the larger human experience? How does Pacific Oceanic archaeology relate with a larger Asia-Pacific context or with the scope of world archaeology? The new second edition of Archaeology of Pacific Oceania addresses these questions and more, providing an updated synthesis of this important region.
Archaeology of Pacific Oceania is for scholars of Asia-Pacific archaeology and anthropology and will support students investigating the archaeology of Pacific Oceania.
Chapter 1 Research themes in Pacific Oceanic archaeology Chapter 2 Regional context and perspectives Chapter 3 Substance and scope of Pacific Oceanic archaeology Chapter 4 Hunter-gatherer traditions in the western Asia-Pacific region Chapter 5 Following the Asia-Pacific pottery trail, 4000 through 800 B.C. Chapter 6 First contact with the Remote Oceanic environment Chapter 7 A siege of ecological imperialism Chapter 8 The end of an era Chapter 9 A broad-spectrum revolution? 500 B.C. through A.D. 100 Chapter 10 The atoll highway of Micronesia, A.D. 100 through 500 Chapter 11 Ethnogenesis and polygenesis, A.D. 500 through 1000 Chapter 12 An A.D. 1000 event? Formalization of cultural expressions Chapter 13 Expansion and intensification, A.D. 1000 through 1800 Chapter 14 Living with the past
Mike T. Carson (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i, 2002) has investigated the broad geographic range and chronological scope of archaeological landscapes throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He was author of several books about Pacific Oceanic archaeology and ancient landscapes, editor of Palaeolandscapes in Archaeology: Lessons for the Past and Future (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor of Asian Perspectives: The Journal of Archaeology for Asia and the Pacific (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014–2020). He currently is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam.
