Thomas P. Leppard

Multi-Period Landscape Survey and Site Risk Assessment on Montserrat, West Indies

ABSTRACT Following a series of devastating and ongoing volcanic eruptions, the archaeological record of Montserrat (West Indies) has been exposed to the dual threats of destructive pyroclastic volcanism, and the construction of new infrastructure and settlements to accommodate those displaced as a result. Yet, with the exception of contributions from a handful of site-based research projects, the scope of prehistoric and historical archaeology of Montserrat remains poorly understood overall, in contrast to many of the other Leeward Islands. In 2010 the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat project (SLAM) was established to create an inventory and accompanying risk assessment of archaeological sites and features in the islands non-exclusion zone, an essential resource for Montserrats preservation officials. This is the initial step in an ongoing research program that also provides the basis for a diachronic and integrated temporal approach to archaeological studies of population movements and distribution, land use strategies, and risk management over the course of the islands human occupational history. The present article discusses the projects overall approach and presents some initial results that illustrate the richness and complexity of archaeological resources in the area most subject to the impacts of rapid redevelopment.

Passive Dispersal versus Strategic Dispersal in Island Colonization by Hominins

It has been argued recently that artifacts from islands in the Mediterranean and Island Southeast Asia are representative of deliberate maritime colonization by archaic hominins. This runs contrary to the more usual understanding of seas and oceans as barriers to rather than enablers of dispersal in Homo. This paper advances the debate beyond an impasse between maximalist and minimalist interpretations of these data by suggesting that passive sweepstakes dispersal events may be implicated in the distribution of Homo. Very unlikely in the short term but increasingly likely over evolutionary time, it is argued that the small body of data that has been taken to be indicative of early seagoing could in fact represent the archaeological signature of passive long-distance dispersal by archaic hominins. This allows these data to be built into the standard model of hominin dispersal without abandoning the concept of oceans as, in general, representative of barriers to this process.

Patterning and Its Causation in the Pre-Neolithic Colonization of the Mediterranean Islands (Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene)

ABSTRACTIn 1981 one of us (Cherry) first attempted to identify spatial and temporal patterning in the human colonization of the Mediterranean islands. Since the 1980s, slowly accumulating evidence has suggested that the Mediterranean islands were sporadically inhabited by hunter-gatherers during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Here we seek to establish whether or not these data exhibit regularity. We suggest that evidence for Upper Palaeolithic to Mesolithic activity, tending to cluster on larger or less remote islands, indicates that while humans were clearly capable of reaching the Mediterranean islands prior to the Neolithic, their general reluctance to do so can be explained in terms of the variable environmental attractiveness of the insular Mediterranean. Tending to be relatively small, dry, and biologically depauperate, the Mediterranean islands were largely inhospitable to mobile groups preferring extensive territories with diverse and robust biotas. Sedentism only became a widely viable ...

Mobility and migration in the Early Neolithic of the Mediterranean: questions of motivation and mechanism

Abstract The spread of the Neolithic throughout Mediterranean Europe involved, at least to some degree, the physical movement of farmers westwards. This mobility has often been attributed to demographic or climatic factors, and long-term environmental changes of this type surely provided the backdrop against which subsistence practices and behavioral strategies developed. However, changing environmental parameters, while posing challenges to established Early Neolithic farming regimes, did not in and of themselves establish mobility and migration as self-selecting solutions to increased social pressure; we do not fully understand how these pressures were experienced at the level of the individual, the family or the village. This article suggests that embedded Early Neolithic cultural attitudes to subsistence and surplus – and in particular the tension between incentives to hoard and imperatives to share – rendered Early Neolithic communities fragile, with tendencies to fission. It is further argued that oscillations in drought frequency during the seventh millennium bc may have made mobility an increasingly attractive adaptive strategy in the face of intra-community tensions. Throughout, emphasis is placed on human responses to change as mediated through culturally specific circumstances.

Maritime hominin dispersals in the Pleistocene: advancing the debate

To what extent is there spatial and temporal patterning in the spread of our genus around the planet, and what environmental and behavioural factors specify this patterning? The prevailing model of Pleistocene dispersals of Homo holds that this process was essentially terrestrial, with oceans and seas inhibiting and directing the movement of hominins out of Africa (e.g. Mellars 2006; Dennell & Petraglia 2012; Gamble 2013), although some scholars propose short-range maritime hops at both the Strait of Gibraltar and Bab-el-Mandeb (Lambeck et al. 2011; Rolland 2013). The relatively recent discovery of stone tools with apparently Lower and Middle Palaeolithic characteristics on islands in the eastern Mediterranean and in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) has, however, been used by some scholars to challenge this terrestrial model.

The Evolution of Modern Behaviour and its Implications for Maritime Dispersal During the Palaeolithic

Oceans and seas are more frequently thought to have been barriers to than enablers of movement for archaic hominins. This interpretation has been challenged by a revisionist model which suggests that bodies of water facilitated the dispersal of pre-moderns. This paper addresses the revisionist model by defining maritime dispersal as a series of cognitive and organizational problems, the capacity to solve which must have arisen during the evolution of Homo . The central question posed is: knowing the type of social and cognitive configuration necessary for strategic maritime dispersal, and knowing the social and cognitive capacities of hominin species implied in the revisionist dispersal model, how likely is it that such species possessed the capacity to undertake purposive maritime colonization? Available data suggest that the evolution of modern cognitive architecture during the Late Pleistocene correlates positively with increasing evidence for maritime dispersal in the Upper Palaeolithic, and that behavioural modernity is implicated in the appearance of strategic maritime dispersal in Homo. Consequently, it is likely that deliberate trans-oceanic seagoing is restricted to Anatomically Modern Humans, and possibly Neanderthals.

Experimental archaeology and the earliest seagoing: the limitations of inference

Abstract Experimental voyaging, of the type made famous by the Kon-Tiki and the Hōkūleʻa, is often considered to provide a means of modelling the performance of ancient seacraft, a relevant variable if we are to understand patterning in prehistoric island colonization and maritime interaction. Recently, in order to bolster claims otherwise dependent on contentious data, some proponents who argue for maritime colonisation as an evolutionarily ancient behaviour have suggested that such experiments provide corroborating evidence for deliberate seagoing by archaic hominins. Here, we examine the epistemological foundation for these claims, and in particular what constitutes the basis for building good analogues in archaeological reasoning and the limitations of inferences drawn from them. We stress the importance of not conflating possibilities with probabilities, and caution against an unwarranted uniformitarianism in making assumptions regarding the cognitive, social, behavioural and technological contexts of archaic and modern humans.

Similarity and Diversity in the Prehistoric Colonization of Islands and Coasts by Food-Producing Communities

ABSTRACT The colonization of the Pacific, Caribbean, and Mediterranean by food-producing communities in prehistory has rarely been considered in an explicitly comparative perspective. This article suggests that, despite evident human and environmental diversity, these insular colonization episodes have certain formal and processual similarities, especially in terms of the rate and dynamics of the colonization episodes. Specifically, in all three cases, colonizing populations seem to have rapidly crossed very great distances to find new niches, only for these events to be followed by generations of colonizing inactivity. It is proposed that such patterning may be a feature which is somehow common to episodes of coastal and insular colonization by food-producing, pre-state communities. Reasons as to why this might be—including ecological and demographic factors—are considered. This study indicates the utility of a comparative approach, and contributes to the ongoing debate centered on the extent to which insularity conditions human behavior.

Archaeology, historical ecology and anthropogenic island ecosystems

In the face of environmental uncertainty due to anthropogenic climate change, islands are at the front lines of global change, threatened by sea level rise, habitat alteration, extinctions and declining biodiversity. Islands also stand at the forefront of scientific study for understanding the deep history of human ecodynamics and to build sustainable future systems. We summarize the long history of human interactions with Polynesian, Mediterranean, Californian and Caribbean island ecosystems, documenting the effects of various waves of human settlement and socioeconomic systems, from hunter–gatherer–fishers, to agriculturalists, to globalized colonial interests. We identify degradation of island environments resulting from human activities, as well as cases of human management of resources to enhance productivity and create more sustainable systems. These case studies suggest that within a general global pattern of progressive island degradation, there was no single trajectory of human impact, but rather complex effects based on variable island physiographies, human subsistence strategies, population densities, technologies, sociopolitical organization and decision-making.

The biophysical effects of Neolithic island colonization: general dynamics and sociocultural implications

Does anthropogenic environmental change constrain long-term sociopolitical outcomes? It is clear that human colonization of islands radically alters their biological and physical systems. Despite considerable contextual variability in local specificities of this alteration, I argue that these processes are to some extent regular, predictable, and have socio-political implications. Reviewing the data for post-colonization ecodynamics, I show that Neolithic colonization of previously insulated habitats drives biotic homogenization. I argue that we should expect such homogenization to promote regular types of change in biophysical systems, types of change that can be described in sum as environmentally convergent. Such convergence should have significant implications for human social organization over the long term, and general dynamics of this sort are relevant in the context of understanding remarkably similar social evolutionary trajectories towards wealth-inequality not only islands, but also more generally.