Observations on the Northern Moluccan excavated animal bone and shell collections

Abstract

Due to their isolation, the Northern Moluccan islands today contain only a very impoverished and mainly marsupial indigenous Wallacean vertebrate fauna that includes the cuscuses Phalanger ornatus and Phalanger alexandriae (Flannery and Boeadi 1995), the sugar glider Petaurus breviceps (not found so far in any archaeological contexts in the Northern Moluccas), and the large placental rodent Rattus morotaiensis (Flannery 1995a). These species have been supplemented by several humanly mediated introductions of placental mammal species, such as Rattus exulans, R. tanezumi, Suncus marinus, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, Cervis timorensis, plus pigs and dogs (Flannery et al. 1995).