Preserving coastal environments requires an integrated natural and cultural resources management approach.

Integration of natural and cultural resource management is urgently needed to combat the effects of climate change. Scientists must contend with how human-induced climate change and rapid population expansion are fundamentally reworking densely inhabited coastal zones. We propose that a merger of archaeology, environmental science, and land management policy-different yet intertwined domains-is needed to address dramatic losses to biocultural resources that comprise coupled cultural-natural systems.

Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record.

Defining wealth broadly to include wealth in people, relational connections, and material possessions, we examine the prehistory of wealth inequality at the level of the residential units using the consistent proxy of Gini coefficients calculated across areas of contemporaneous residential units. In a sample of >1,100 sites and > 47,000 residential units spanning >10,000 y, persistent wealth inequality typically lags the onset of plant cultivation by more than a millennium. It accompanies landscape modifications and subsistence practices in which land (rather than labor) limits production, and growth of hierarchies of settlement size.

War both reduced and increased inequality over the past ten thousand years.

Scholars are divided over the long-term effects that war has had on inequality. Some have argued that conflict grows the gap between rich and poor. Others counter that violence levels out wealth differences.

Labor, land, and the global dynamics of economic inequality.

Here, we assess the extent to which land use relating to food acquisition (farming, herding, foraging) and associated value regimes shaped past economic inequality. We consider the hypothesis that land-use systems in which production was limited by heritable material wealth (such as land) sustained higher levels of inequality than those limited by (free) human labor. We address this hypothesis using the Global Dynamics of InequalIty (GINI) project database, estimating economic inequalities based on disparities in residential unit area and storage capacity within sites in different world regions and through time.

Links between climatic histories and the rise and fall of a Pacific chiefdom.

Sea level rise and climate change are shaping present societies, particularly those on oceanic islands. Few historical examples could serve as references for these changes. One such potential model is the Saudeleur Dynasty with its capital Nan Madol on the Pacific Island of Pohnpei.

Implications of anomalous relative sea-level rise for the peopling of Remote Oceania.

Beginning ~3,500 to 3,300 y B.P., humans voyaged into Remote Oceania.

Origins of Polynesian Pigs Revealed by Mitochondrial Whole Genome Ancient DNA.

Domestic pigs () were first transported to Polynesia through a series of long-distance voyages ultimately linked to the Neolithic expansion of Austronesian-speaking people out of Asia. The descendants of the founding pigs belong to a rare mtDNA group referred to as the "Pacific Clade" that may have originated in peninsular or island Southeast Asia. We report the first whole genome mtDNA from domestic pigs from any of the remote islands of the Pacific.

Archaeological assessment reveals Earth's early transformation through land use.

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in kukui (Aleurites moluccanus) endocarp along rainfall and elevation gradients: Archaeological implications.

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes are often used to make inferences of past environments and social patterns. We analyze δ 13C and δ 15N values in contemporary kukui (Aleurites moluccanus) endocarp to examine the effects of site environment. Results from across environmental transects on Hawai'i Island show strong patterns for both stable isotopes.

Strategies for obtaining obsidian in pre-European contact era New Zealand.

Archaeological evidence of people's choices regarding how they supply themselves with obsidian through direct access and different types of exchanges gives us insight in to mobility, social networks, and property rights in the distant past. Here we use collections of obsidian artefacts that date to a period of endemic warfare among Maori during New Zealand's Late Period (1500-1769 A.D.