“When They Wished to Send a Message, They Called It Out, and the People Passed it Along by Calling One to Another, so Dense was the Population”. First LiDAR Data on ‘Uvea (Wallis Island), West Polynesia

Christophe Sand1,2*, Ipasio Masei3, and Romain Alliod4

For a long time, the Islands of Western Polynesia in the central Pacific have epitomised the demonstration of low indigenous depopulation in Oceania following first European contacts. Reassessment of the historical data and recent LiDAR analysis have started to question this hypothesis, identifying dense pre-contact archaeological settlement patterns in Tonga and Samoa. This paper proposes to present the first LiDAR data from the small Island of ‘Uvea (Wallis Island). Partial LiDAR coverage has highlighted the presence of a continuous nexus of roads, walls, mounds, planting structures, ditches and raised burials, in areas today devoid of human occupation. The density and interconnection of these former settlements are testimony of a complex intensification process of landscape use during the pre-contact period and strongly question the orthodox ethnographic claim of a stable demographic history for ‘Uvea during the past three centuries.