Metaphor and theory in island archaeology

Abstract

Anthropologists after World War II were vocal in saying the apparent remoteness and marginality of islands in the Pacific made them laboratories of a sort. In 1997, however, Terry Hunt, Chris Gosden, and I reported that by then another research agenda had replaced this old one in the Pacific. Rather than seeing these islands as distant and undeveloped human colonies scattered across a vast and empty expanse of sea, modern scholarship was discovering the Pacific had long been a sphere of human accomplishments, and the ocean itself had long been an avenue for interchange, not a barrier to human affairs. Today, however, it seems we were being too optimistic. Islands are still often described in ways suggesting they are basically remote, isolated, and bounded miniature worlds. As a scientific category, however, islands vary in their size, shape, environmental characteristics, degree of isolation, and the like, and I would argue that it is not a foregone conclusion that working on islands has a decided edge over doing field work anywhere else on Earth.