Prehistoric Island Colonization and Seafaring in the Caribbean and the Pacific

Scott M. Fitzpatrick of the University of Oregon examines how winds, ocean currents and watercraft technology structured the prehistoric settlement of islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Opening the 57th Public Lecture Series of the Archaeological Research Unit, he begins with Broodbank's distinction between sea-going, seafaring and voyaging, traces global island colonization from Homo erectus on Flores around 800,000 to 900,000 years ago to the late Holocene, and reviews the debate between views of islands as isolated cultural laboratories and views of universal interaction.

In the Caribbean, Fitzpatrick covers the Lithic and Archaic settlements from about 8,000 years ago and the arrival of ceramic-making Saladoid groups around 2,500 years ago. He presents evidence for links with South and Central America, including jadeite and serpentinite ornaments, tumbaga gold-copper alloy, cohoba snuffing bowls, triangular zemis, and a single obsidian flake from Puerto Rico that he suggests may have arrived in floating pumice. Because Caribbean peoples paddled dugout canoes without sails or outriggers against east-to-west winds and currents, radiocarbon chronologies and Richard Callaghan's computer simulations indicate that settlers moved directly between northern South America and the Greater Antilles and Puerto Rico, bypassing the southern Lesser Antilles until later.

Turning to the Pacific, Fitzpatrick outlines the settlement of Near and Remote Oceania around 3300 to 3000 BP, the two-thousand-year pause around Samoa and Tonga, and the colonization of East Polynesia, Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand. Computer simulations show how double-hulled canoes, crab-claw sails and wind reversals during El Niño events enabled eastward voyaging, why treacherous currents kept Palau isolated from Spanish contact until 1783, and how an El Niño event in 1520 to 1521 carried Magellan's fleet far north of the Moluccas.