Are the earliest field monuments of the Pacific landscape serial sites? In A Pacific Odyssey: Archaeology and Anthropology in the Western Pacific. Papers in Honour of Jim Specht

Abstract

Explanations of the origin and genesis of Pacific field monuments commonly assume they reflect local social change in islands or island groups which were increasingly isolated following colonization. A recent review of early West Polynesian archaeology suggests that the pene- contemporaneous appearance of various kinds of field monuments from eastern Melanesia to Polynesia may be better explained as evidence of interaction and the movement of people and/or ideas, possibly associated with the colonization of East Polynesia.