With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Julie Field, Chris Roos, and John Dudgeon will use archaeological, geoarchaeological, and paleoecological analyses to explore the transition from marine foraging to sedentary farming in the centuries following the colonization of the Fiji Islands.
This research will determine how and when food production developed in Fijian prehistory, and examine how this transition relates to evident changes in diet, settlement, material culture, demography, and island ecology. This topic is particularly relevant to current research questions in Oceania, in particular the decline of the signature elements of the founding society, the Lapita, and the emergence of the core components of the Oceanic societies of New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. By the contact period these island groups had large populations, vast agricultural systems, and ranked societies, but the relative importance of food production to this process is not well understood and has received little direct study.
The team will focus on the Sigatoka Valley, located on the island of Viti Levu, and will examine the range of variables used to forage or produce food. The researchers will employ a high-resolution retrodictive GIS-based model. This model will provide the foundation for geoarchaeological investigations within several watersheds to determine the frequency of natural and human-induced fire, and build a picture of landscape change from forest canopy to open farmland. Large areal excavations will be conducted with the goal of retrieving evidence of foraging and food production by Fiji's earliest inhabitants. Radiocarbon dating of features and artifacts related to food processing and consumption will be used to generate a chronology for agricultural development in Fiji. The project will also conduct isotopic analyses on recovered bone in order to examine human diet, the relative increasing importance of cultivated foods.
Research in Fiji will build upon a history of collaboration between US archaeologists and the Fiji Museum that began in 1947. Fieldwork and subsequent laboratory analyses will provide training and research opportunities for students in Fiji and the United States, and will be connected to a series of educational programs for Fijian adults and schoolchildren that emphasizes cultural resource management and the natural sciences. Reports and data generated from this project will be shared with local communities via the Fiji Museum, and also published internationally.
