ABSTRACT
The Austronesian expansion into the near shore and lagoon biome prevalent throughout insular Southeast Asia and Oceania introduced modern humans to a unique evolutionary environment. At once both abundant in marine resources and depauperate in terrestrial ones, the island ecosystems encountered by the earliest settlers required both cultural and biological adaptive mechanisms for successful, permanent, habitation. In Remote Oceania, however, there is a paucity of human skeletal assemblages that date back to the earliest stages of colonization, and even of those representing the generations that adapted to island environments in the centuries after initial settlement. A number of sites, including Teouma in Vanuatu (Bedford et al., 2006) and Naton Beach on Guam in the Marianas (DeFant, 2008) do have a significant number of skeletal remains, though the former is representative of Lapita and a separate pulse of migration, and the latter site dates to nearly a millennium after the Marianas were thought to have been first occupied c.1,550 bce (Hung et al., 2011; Carson and Kurashina, 2012). In Micronesia generally, there is only one site-Chelechol ra Orrak in Palau (Figure 17.1, Chapter 17) which has a large, demographically robust enough sample to allow examination of how humans adapted to smaller archipelagos in the Pacific. In this chapter, we will review what we have learned to this point about life in early Palau through examination of the skeletal biology and archaeology of the Orrak cemetery. The analysis demonstrates the unique nature of the site and its implications for understanding how Palauans lived and adapted to the archipelago.
