The Role of Animal Translocations in the First Settlement of Geographic Micronesia

Silvia Tardaguila Giacomozzi*, Rachel Wood, Greger Larson, and Dylan Gaffney

The ecological and economic value of animal translocations for the peopling of Micronesia remains poorly understood. The voyage of Austronesian-speaker populations with a set of commensal animals (pigs, dogs, chickens, and rats) and familiar plant species, jointly known as “transported landscapes”, was originally argued as a major strategy for peopling the remote islands of the Pacific during the Late Holocene. However, these “transported landscapes” have not been fully supported for the peopling of Micronesia. Focusing on the animal translocations, neither the age estimates nor the origin and taxonomic distribution of the zooarchaeological record suggest the translocation of a defined set of animal species coeval with the first settlement of the region. In need of alternative explanations, this paper presents a new systematic review of published and grey literature recording anthropogenic animal translocations to Micronesia. For this, the literature has been first filtered, considering the robustness of zooarchaeological identifications and age estimates for previously reported faunal samples. Considering previous work, possible translocation patterns have then been extracted from this selection, analysing each animal species separately and not necessarily as a defined set. The results of this paper promise to inform future approaches to advance our understanding of the role of animal translocations in the first settlement of Micronesia. This particularly calls for finding sensible ways to apply geochronological (radiocarbon dating) and biomolecular (aDNA and ZooMs) methods directly to the faunal bones.