Settlement patterns and cultural landscapes in the past of Oceania

Conveners: Christophe SAND – Institute of Archaeology of New Caledonia and the Pacific (IANCP) - christophe.sand@iancp.nc; Frederique VALENTIN – Arscan-CNRS (France)
Archaeological surveys have since decades identified in the archipelagos of the Pacific a diversified set of pre-contact settlement patterns, testimony of former cultural traditions of landscape appropriation and enhancement. These rank from sometimes massive habitation, ritual or funerary constructions to dense clusters of village/town or fortified settings, as well as extended surfaces of intensified horticultural arrangements. Until recently, the vast majority of the maps produced by archaeologists where the result of long and painstaking survey projects, often in scrub or forested ecological environments, limiting the visibility of field remains and impacting on the extent as well as sometimes the completeness of the final maps. The ever-growing corpus of technical high resolution methods applied to the study of archaeological landscapes, especially (but not only) with the recent development of LiDAR (Laser detection and ranging) coverage in a number of islands across the region, has allowed to renew interpretation of the density of former landscape uses across Oceania. This has prompted reconsideration of a number of well settled assumptions, like the supposed poor use of Melanesian landscapes when compared to Polynesia. This session proposes to present a series of case-studies on the latest developments of archaeological and related studies in the field of cultural landscapes in the Pacific region, addressing different approaches associated to the wide range of techniques that can today be applied to this topic.