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Neolithic arrival in the Pacific involved, as in other parts of the world, the translocation of domesticated plants and animals by pottery-making cultures in prehistory. Globally uncommon, though, was the abandonment of pottery on some islands and the extirpation of the pig (Sus scrofa/verrucosus) and dog (Canis familiaris) -the two largest mammalian quadrupeds introduced to Oceania -from the subsistence and cultural systems. This paper examines the extirpation of pigs from the Palau Islands as a case study to understand why an important domesticate has such an uneven prehistoric distribution. When suids are fed agricultural produce required to sustain the human population, it has been proposed that competition and extirpation will result, especially on small islands with limited arable land. However, pigs are considered problem animals in many environments because of the damage they cause to horticultural production, particularly the effects of free-range pigs on gardens and plantations. It is suggested that extirpation and low-level animal keeping are a response to the threat that pigs pose to plant food yields and social relations.

This paper deals with the physical and environmental effects resulting from oceanic impacts by sizable comets, and the rates and risks associated with such cosmic impacts. Specifically, we investigate two sets of probable oceanic impact events that occurred within the last 5,000 years, one in the Indian Ocean about 2800 BC, and the other in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Australia) about AD 536. If validated, they would be the most energetic natural catastrophes occurring during the middle-to-late Holocene with large-scale environmental and historical human effects and consequences. The physical evidence for these two impacts consists of several sets of data: (1) remarkable depositional traces of coastal flooding in dunes (chevron dunes) found in southern Madagascar and along the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, (2) the presence of crater candidates (29-km Burckle crater about 1,500 km southeast of Madagascar which dates to within the last 6,000 years and 18-km Kanmare and 12-km Tabban craters with an estimated age of AD 572±86 in the southeast corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria), and (3) the presence of quench textured magnetite spherules and nearly pure carbon spherules, teardrop-shaped tektites with trails of ablation, and vitreous material found by cutting-edge laboratory analytical techniques in the upper-most layer of core samples close to the crater candidates.Although some propose a wind-blown origin for V-shaped chevron dunes that are widely distributed around the coastlines of the Indian Ocean and in the Gulf of Carpentaria, we have evidence in favor of their

This article discusses prehistoric irrigation canals recently excavated near Phoenix, Arizona. The canals were constructed by the Hohokam Indians between A.D. 850 and 1450. Several aerial photographs taken at various times in the past five decades clearly show the paths of hundreds of the canals, including some of those recently excavated. These data provide new insights on Hohokam irrigation technology and society. Despite the destructive inroads of modern development, much significant archeological information can still be retrieved both by conventional excavation methods and by the archival study of aerial photographs.