Archaeological evidence suggests that dogs were introduced to the islands of Oceania via Island Southeast Asia around 3,300 years ago, and reached the eastern islands of Polynesia by the fourteenth century AD. This dispersal is intimately tied to human expansion, but the involvement of dogs in Pacific migrations is not well understood. Our analyses of seven new complete ancient mitogenomes and five partial mtDNA sequences from archaeological dog specimens from Mainland and Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific suggests at least three dog dispersal events into the region, in addition to the introduction of dingoes to Australia. We see an early introduction of dogs to Island Southeast Asia, which does not appear to extend into the islands of Oceania. A shared haplogroup identified between Iron Age Taiwanese dogs, terminal-Lapita and post-Lapita dogs suggests that at least one dog lineage was introduced to Near Oceania by or as the result of interactions with Austronesian language speakers associated with the Lapita Cultural Complex. We did not find any evidence that these dogs were successfully transported beyond New Guinea. Finally, we identify a widespread dog clade found across the Pacific, including the islands of Polynesia, which likely suggests a post-Lapita dog introduction from southern Island Southeast Asia.

Thirty years after Muckelroy's seminal 1976 paper on shipwreck site formation, research on the cultural processes which contribute to the creation and modification of shipwrecks remains limited. It is proposed that by adopting a process-oriented framework, we can integrate and synthesize the documentary, oral and archaeological evidence of human response to shipwreck into a structure which parallels the physical progress of the disaster. Possible cultural responses to shipwreck are considered, from pre-voyage planning through to post-impact salvage, including physical correlations potentially visible in the archaeological record.

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We present U‐Pb ages of zircons extracted from olive jars recovered from two sites associated with Alvaro de Mendaña y Neyra's colonising expedition to the Solomon Islands, c. 1595–1596 A.D. The olive jars were previously associated with Panamanian and Peruvian origins based on petrological and geochemical studies. To further define provenance, 143 zircons were extracted from five olive jar sherds, analyzed and dated. The resultant U‐Pb ages range from the Archaean to the Cenozoic (2977.2 ± 29.0–3.2 ± 4.0 Ma), but the dominance of Cretaceous and Palaeogene ages (∼ 90% of the total age population is between ∼ 145 and 23 Ma) supports a Peruvian origin based on comparative geology, with the Coastal Batholith of Peru a prime candidate area of ceramic production. These results are significant for the characterization of 16th Century Peruvian‐made pottery and our understanding of its production and trade.