Epilogue: Changing Archaeological Perspectives upon Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands

Late-twentieth-century archaeological perspectives upon historical ecology in the Pacific islands emphasized anthropogenic impacts documented particularly in studies of vegetation change and deforestation, and the depletion or extinction of native faunas. More complex views of cultural-environmental relationships are now emerging. Biological invasions are seen as occurring more variably than in the transported landscapes model, simplistic narratives of cultural collapse are shown as only partly in agreement with relevant data, and models of behavioral ecology are argued as insufficient to explain long-term trajectories of ecological change. More influential roles are being proposed for climatic and demographic factors and cultural agency in ecological relations. In considering how archaeological perspectives upon historical ecology are changing it is instructive to glance at Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands (Kirch and Hunt 1997), which collated papers from a session of the 17th Pacific Science Congress in 1991. The main sessional themes that emerged from the contributions were natural versus anthropogenic change, anthropogenic impacts on island ecosystems, environmental evidence of human colonization (seeking anthropogenic environmental data), reciprocal impacts of environmental change and human society, and fragility versus resilience of island ecosystems. Clearly, the principal emphasis of these was the crucial influence of long-term human impacts, many deleterious, on the histories of island ecosystems, a topic largely absent from the otherwise highly influential Man’s Place in the Island Ecosystem (papers from the 10th Pacific Science Congress [Fosberg 1963]), to which the genesis of a modern Pacific island historical ecology is largely, and rightly, attributed. Although the historical significance of people in shaping Pacific island ecosystems remains at the core in the current collection of papers, a more complex understanding of that is now emerging, or so it seems to me. I comment here on three topics discussed in papers from the 21st Pacific Science Congress that suggest new emphases in Pacific historical ecology: biological invasions, landscape history, and behavioral ecology. The Pacific islands, often taken as cognate with ‘‘Oceania,’’ include here the Pacific offshore islands of the Americas, which have their own distinguished record of research in his-