Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 04:50
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Kuril Islands Biocomplexity 08

Given that humans have a disposition towards wandering around the landscape, either by following their mobile subsistence resources, social expansion pressure or through sheer curiosity, it seems unlikely that Makhanrushi would be devoid of some kind of archaeological record. Just being off the beaten track and isolated shouldn't really be an obstructing factor -- if it was, then would have any of the tiny dots of islands in the South Pacific have ever been colonized?

Mon, 08/04/2008 - 06:31

KBP Team

The question isn't so much one of whether or not people were ever on these islands. It is more a question of whether or not they were able to live there in any sustained fashion. There are plenty of examples of islands that, for whatever reason, had only limited or zero history of human occupation: the Commander Islands (Russia), the Pribilof Islands (Alaska), the Farallon Islands (California), and, except for relatively recently, that famously tiny dot of an island in the South Pacific, Easter Island.One of our main research goals is to try to figure out what factors make these islands habitable or not. Island biogeography would lead us to expect that two extremely important factors are size of the island and proximity to the mainland (or other large land mass that would act as a "source" to replenish dwindling human populations or the resources they exploit). But cultural factors such as the size and strength of support networks from neighboring islands or communities will also determine the resilience of any given population. Note that these cultural factors should also co-vary with island size and proximity to the mainland.
In the Kurils, two other important variables are frequency and intensity of volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. If the only area of an island with suitable land for constructing pit houses is 7 m above sea level, and 10 m tsunamis are a fairly regular occurrence (which they are out here), people probably won't be able to thrive there. In the Kurils, one obvious example is Ketoi Island. Although it is in the heart of the Kuril Archipelago, it is a relatively young, actively growing volcanic cone projecting out of the ocean. There are four basic landforms on Ketoi: active beach, vertical cliffs, steeply graded talus slopes, or steeply graded lava flows.That doesn't leave people many options for long-term occupation.
Do we think Ketoi was never visited by humans? Of course not - there are lots of valuable resources there, including sea birds, sea bird eggs, sea mammals, and water. There is no reason to think that people ignored those resources in the short term. But after intensive exploration of the island, the archaeology team has concluded that people did not live there for any extended periods of time.
Might we have missed a site on Ketoi? Of course we might have - one of the frustrating limitations of the archaeological record is that low-density and/or short-term human occupations are notoriously difficult to detect - this is just as true in the Kuril Islands as it is anywhere in the world. Regardless of where in the world archaeologists have asked the question: "When did people first get here," the precise answer has been very difficult to pin down.
To bring this back around to the question of whether or not we should have expected to find evidence of human occupation on Makanrushi, perhaps we should have. But based on the maps available to us, and our experiences in the rest of the Kuril Archipelago (this is fifth season that American archaeologists from our team have worked here, but Dr. Shubin has been doing archaeology here for over 40 years), we did not expect to find so many house pits (>30) that were so well preserved. And we certainly didn't expect to find so many deposits of preserved midden! We are still developing hypotheses to explain the distribution of preserved middens - as of yet we have not been able to determine any common thread to the few that we have found in the archipelago.
Thanks for the thoughtful posting!
---Dr. E.