Mollusk collecting and environmental change during the Prehistoric Period in the Mariana Islands

Abstract

Archaeological research in the Mariana Islands has revealed changes in mollusk collecting during the Prehistoric Period (approximately 1500 BC to AD 1521). The earliest people at Tumon Bay, Guam and Chalan Piao, Saipan collected mostly bivalves, especially the arc clam Anadara antiquata. After several hundred years, they no longer collected A. antiquata, but collected smaller bivalves instead. By AD 1000, they collected mostly gastropods, primarily the coral reef species Strombus gibberulus gibbosus. One possible explanation is that the people preferred the large arc clam but overharvested it until they were forced to eat the smaller bivalves and then the snails. However, recent evidence in the form of mangrove wood and mangrove pollen supports another explanation, one of non-anthropogenic environmental change. In this case, the relative sea-level decline, which took place in the Marianas within the last 4,000 years, caused the demise of mangrove habitats and of the arc clam at Tumon Bay, Guam and Chalan Piao, Saipan. As mangrove habitats were diminished by sea-level decline, collecting effort shifted to coral reefs, and S. gibberulus gibbosus was harvested throughout the remainder of the Prehistoric Period and into the Historic Period. Southern Guam is the only area in the Marianas in which A. antiquata increased in abundance during the Prehistoric Period. The same types of evidence, mangrove wood and mangrove pollen, indicate that, in contrast to the situation at Tumon Bay and Chalan Piao, mangroves increased in abundance in southern Guam.