Prehistoric Marine Resource Use in the Indo-Pacific Regions (Terra Australis 39)

Abstract

terra australis 39Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. This volume contains a total of eleven papers which constitute a diverse but generally coherent collection on past and present marine resource use in the Indo-Pacific region, within a humanecological perspective. The geographical focus extends from Eastern Asia, mainly Japan and Insular Southeast Asia (especially the Philippines) to the tropical Pacific (Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia) with geographically outlying papers on sites in coastal Tanzania (Indian Ocean) and coastal California (North Pacific). List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolumeMost of these papers were originally presented during the session entitled "Historical Ecology and Marine Resource Use in the Indo-Pacific Region" at the 19th IPPA (Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association) Congress held in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2009, which the editors of this volume organised. Our main purpose in organising this session was to discuss and reconsider the unique position of archaeology in providing a long-term perspective on past marine ecosystems and human ecodynamics in the Indo-Pacific region.Although historic sources provide information on recent centuries, archaeology can provide longer-term understandings of pre-industrial marine exploitation in the Indo-Pacific region. Archaeological data can provide valuable baseline data for evaluating contemporary ecological trends. With this understanding, we invited papers on current technical, methodological, and theoretical studies on a variety of topics such as fish and shell analyses, prehistoric fishing, ethnoarchaeology, or even traditional and modern fishing in the Indo-Pacific region. A total of fourteen papers were presented during the IPPA Congress session. Among these papers, nine papers are contributed and included in this volume, with the addition of three more papers (by Braje et al., Hashimura, and Segi) that were planned for the session, but could not be presented in Hanoi. We are pleased to include these papers in this volume.The volume divided into four parts based on the paper topics and temporal foci. Part 1 contains five papers that discuss prehistoric-to-historic marine resource use in the Indo-Pacific Region, based on recent excavations and archaeological analyses in Micronesia, Polynesia, the North Pacific coast, and the Indian Ocean.Richard Olmo argues that archaeological fish bone analyses in the tropical Pacific have rarely provided information below the family level, and this has not only constrained researchers' interpretations of prehistoric behaviour, but has also introduce...