Search

The first Austronesian settlers at the site of San Roque in Saipan and the southern Mariana Islands began arriving sometime after 1500 BC in what is called the Early Pre-Latte Period. A comparison of San Roque to contemporaneous island sites reveals differences in cooking and habitation features, ceramic vessels and decorative styles, marine shell tools and ornaments, and settlement patterns that were apparent within and between islands and sites until the middle of the first millennium BC. Changes in sea level and natural resource availability then appear to have accompanied changes in material culture, when some coastal sites were abandoned or moved seaward, while other inhabitants moved inland with a more terrestrial subsistence strategy shared elsewhere in Micronesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary accounts by Spanish visitors to the Mariana Islands during the seventeenth century describe the native Chamorro as a stratified society that was organized into ranked matrilineal clans. Such writers note that while men served as the titular heads of households, women exercised significant power in domestic contexts. The recent excavation of an ancient cemetery (ca. 730 BC to AD 1600/1700) and its grave-good assemblage at Naton Beach on Guam offers an opportunity to independently evaluate Spanish documentary accounts with the archaeological record. A distributional analysis of more than 1700 marine shell and shark tooth ornaments associated with more than 360 burials confirms that adult women were more frequently interred with grave-good ornaments in comparison to adult men. Moreover, women were also buried with a greater number of ornaments and greater diversity of ornament types. We conclude that this archaeological pattern corroborates Spanish documentary accounts of a society wherein women enjoyed significant power in their matrilineal clans for at least 2000 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]