‘Mike who?’ is the response attributed to a US politician when asked about plans for Micronesia. Outside a closed circle of Pacific islanders, academics, military personnel, scuba divers and some politicians, the term Micronesia often elicits a similar response. But the appellation Micronesia is not without its own problems. In the first part of this chapter I explore what is meant by Micronesia, and the variety of possible answers to the ‘Mike who?’ question. This requires a consideration of geography, anthropology, history, voyaging and local self-definitions. Some of these issues have been raised in their historical contexts in the previous two chapters, but here they will be set as acutely contemporary issues, and, as such, I will consider the role that archaeology and heritage have to play within these debates. This archaeological role will be the subject of the second half of the chapter where it will be set within local and wider Pacific contexts. I will conclude by spelling out the main questions that archaeological understandings of Micronesia can be used to speak to at local regional and broader Pacific and global scales, and in particular the roles of fluidity and fusion in contesting and addressing these issues.

Geographical constructs

The basic contemporary understanding of Micronesia, at least the one first identified by anyone using an atlas, is of Micronesia as a geographical entity, one clearly marked as having boundaries in any atlas.

The fluid boundaries discussed in the previous chapter did not come into existence, if indeed they can be said to exist beyond community imagination, by accident, and they are equally not the product of natural creation. These fluid boundaries became imagined in myriad different ways once people settled the islands in the region. All of the islands of this place called Micronesia, in the broadest sense of its imagined boundaries, were islands when people first set their eyes on them. That is, unlike some of the islands of the world in the present day, they were not connected to a continent by ‘land bridges’ at any time in the human past. In this the boundaries were always fluid ones; it was at all times in the past a requirement that the sea be crossed in order to travel to these islands, whether by boat or, beginning in the last century, by aircraft.

Debates surrounding the origins of the islanders of Oceania have been long and, on occasions, heated. The colonization of the islands of Oceania is generally accepted to be the most recent colonization of previously vacant (from a human perspective) land that provides the present distribution of the permanent settlement of our species on earth. (It might be argued that the camps in Antarctica have led to its permanent settlement since the last century.)

It feels as though this book has been a very long time in the making. My first trip to the region was in 1991 as part of a team working in contract archaeology and it was that experience, and discussion with John Craib, Peter White and Roland Fletcher at the University of Sydney, which led me to propose PhD research conducted between 1992 and 1995. Of course, I have continued to maintain my research interests in the region, and although I returned to Europe from Australia in 1997 I have found a new set of colleagues who have been energetic enough to organize colloquia and create a stimulating community through the European Colloquium on Micronesia and for that I thank Beatriz Moral and Anne Di Piazza.

My training in European archaeology, as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield, has guided my research and interpretations, I think, in many ways not typical for the part of the world under discussion in this volume. As such, although I hope it provides a coherent and comprehensive account of the arch-aeology of the region, in its interpretative stance my intention is to provide a fresh understanding of the material evidence.

There are so many individuals and organizations that I have benefited from over the period of the preparation of this book that it is impossible to name them all here. Many I have acknowledged in previous publications, and I thank them again, but others have directly aided the production of the current volume.

Archaeology is about people; it is about constructing an understanding concerning people in the past by using an array of resources. One way of attempting to understand the potential difference between the constructor, that is the archaeologist, and the lives of the past being constructed, is to look to the sources of the recent past, that is, the primary and secondary historical texts reporting encounters between outsiders and the people of the region. These direct texts begin with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in the sixteenth century. Another source, and one that has had as its aim the description of the differences of the lives of the people of these islands, is the ethnographic and synthetic texts of anthropologists.

It is less the case for the anthropological works, but still of some concern, that the majority of these texts are not vehicles for a direct hearing of islander voices. Some of the work, such as parts of the ethnohistorical work of David Hanlon, is drawn directly from oral history, and other works discussed in this book by Rufino Mauricio and Vicente Diaz are the work of islander academics. These are certainly the exceptions rather than the rule and we should constantly keep in mind the words of Epeli Hau'ofa, published nearly three decades ago, that ‘[w]hen [as anthropologists] we produce our articles and monographs and they [the people of the study] or their grandchildren read them, they often cannot see themselves or they see themselves being distorted or misrepresented’ (1975: 284).

In geological terms the two arcs of islands that form the Mariana Islands archipelago (Fig. 5.1) are situated at the junction of two tectonic plates composing the earth's crust. The islands are located on the edge of a subduction zone where the Pacific Plate, moving westwards, dips below the Philippine Plate. Guam is the largest island in the region, having a total land area of 544 square kilometres; the rest of the Marianas group has a combined land area of 478 square kilometres. The islands generally diminish in size in a south to north direction, and on a conventionally coloured map they appear to fade away to blue.

All of the islands north of Saipan, sometimes called the Gani group, are volcanic in origin, consisting of dark igneous rocks (Russell 1998a). The subduction zone, although responsible for the creation of the islands in the first place, also leads to an unstable archipelago, with many of the northern islands volcanically active and all of the islands susceptible to earthquakes. The Marianas are also known for the frequent occurrence of typhoons and droughts. Guam on average experiences a typhoon every three and a half years, and a super-typhoon once a decade. These storms can cause extensive and severe damage to both crops and structures.

The majority of the archaeological evidence derives from the larger southern islands, namely Guam, Rota, Tinian and Saipan. Guam is composed of a limestone plateau in the north and volcanic mountains in the south.

The Carolines form a string of islands paralleling and approximately 7 to 9 degrees to the north of the Equator (Fig. 6.1). Covering two time zones, they straddle the Andesite Line, stretching from 132 to 164 degrees longitude. The 3000 kilometres between the Palau Archipelago in the west and the high igneous peaks of Kosrae in the east are broken for the most part by small islets on atoll reefs, and the occasional ‘high’ island. In fact, most of the Palau group and the island of Kosrae at either end are high islands and, with Pohnpei and those within Chuuk Lagoon, constitute all of the high islands of the group. In this chapter, I will review the archaeology of the western Caroline Islands of the Palau Archipelago, the Southwest Islands (also part of the Republic of Belau), Yap and the atolls of the Caroline chain as a whole.

Palau (Belau)

As noted in chapter, linguistically Palau (or Belau) appears to have a distinct history of settlement when compared to elsewhere in Micronesia. In earlier models this history was assumed to be one of the oldest, as a necessary staging point in the ‘stepping stone’ colonization of the region. As I have mentioned in chapters 4 and 5, this model envisaged the settlement of western Micronesia as a series of moves from the Celebes or Bird's Head of New Guinea areas north through Palau, Yap and finally the Marianas.