Archaeology of Pacific Oceania ─ Inhabiting a Sea of Islands

This book integrates a region-wide chronological narrative of the archaeology of Pacific Oceania. How and why did this vast sea of islands, covering nearly one-third of the world’s surface, come to be inhabited over the last several millennia, transcending significant change in ecology, demography, and society? What can any or all of the thousands of islands offer as ideal model systems toward comprehending globally significant issues of human-environment relations and coping with changing circumstances of natural and cultural history? A new synthesis of Pacific Oceanic archaeology addresses these questions, based largely on the author’s investigations throughout the diverse region.

Mike T. Carson (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Unviersity of Hawai‘i, 2002) has investigated the broad geographic range and chronological scope of archaeological landscapes throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He currently is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam, and he is co-editor of Asian Perspectives: The Journal of Archaeology for Asia and the Pacific.