Galapogas dreaming

Were the archipelagos dotting the South American Pacific coastline stepping-stones for cross-cultural interaction over 500 years ago? An ANU-led team is set to find out.

But for palaeoecologist Dr Simon Haberle the Galapagos Islands, and the other, less well-known archipelagos that dot the length of the South American coast, represent something very different. Haberle, from the Research School of Pacifi c and Asian Studies, is investigating a mystery of the Pacific on the Galapagos Islands, which has been speculated on for decades.

“We want to fi nd out if there was human migration in the Pacific before the arrival of Europeans — that is, if South Americans ever reached Polynesia, or vice versa,” Dr Haberle says.

“Primarily we want to know whether the remote Pacific archipelagos of South America — Cocos, Galapagos, Desventururadas and Juan Fernandez — were stepping stones for interaction between the people of South America and Polynesia over 500 years ago.

“There is some evidence that South Americans either settled on for a short time, or passed through the Galapagos before the islands were discovered by Europeans in the 1500s. It’s also speculated the South Americans reached Polynesia 8,000 kilometres away — but the evidence is very circumstantial.”

The humble sweet potato is one of the most significant pieces of evidence that gives weight to the cultural exchange theory — native to South America, it is common in the South Pacific where it could have only dispersed with the help of human travellers.

And this is where the earliest Pacific migration debate gets interesting. A now renowned Norwegian archaeologist, Thor Heyerdahl, made famous the theory of South Americans taking to the sea, by himself building a primitive wooden boat replica called Kon Tiki and sailing 8,000 kilometres on westerly currents to the outreaches of the Pacific Islands in the 1940s.

It took 101 days, but showed that the boats built by South Americans 500 years ago were capable of taking people of South America to Polynesia.

“This trip by Heyerdahl really captured the imagination of the world and made real the possibility that South Americans could have arrived at the Pacific Islands, and taken things with them, such as the sweet potato,” Dr Haberle says. Heyerdahl and his archaeological colleagues also unearthed other evidence that people passed through the Galapagos, when on an expedition to the Galapagos Islands in 1953 they documented shards of northern Incan pottery and charcoal found beneath materials left later by conquistadors, pirates and colonisers.

“So although there is some evidence, there is no definitive answer to the question of when the Galapagos were first visited by human society, and then if these people continued to sail deep into the Pacific,” Dr Haberle says.

The Galapagos Islands are a World Heritage Site straddling the equator and all research conducted in the biosphere reserve is reviewed and approved by the Charles Darwin Foundation. Implicit in any field studies on the islands is ensuring that the information can be used more broadly for future protection of the sensitive and unique ecosystems.

“We travelled between Isabela, Santiago, Santa Cruz, San Cristobal and Floreana islands — all are different ages, have different types of landscapes and have been impacted differently by colonisation,” he says.

Aside from their main priority to find more clues about the passage of people between Polynesia and South America before discovery by Europeans, the team will also conduct a number of smaller, intersecting research projects. They will study the ecological history of the Galapagos Islands — pollens, fossils and sediments — to find out more about human habitation in the area, but this information will hopefully also shed some light on the native plant biology of the Islands.

Since settlements were established on the islands of the Galapagos, there has been significant damage by introduced species and livestock grazing. Currently, very little is known about the history of introduced species and there are at least 60 species that are of uncertain status (introduced or native).

“The more information we can gather on the ecology of the islands, the better the staff of the park can make informed decisions about what to conserve, and which exotic species to weed out,” Dr Haberle says.

“This is an important element of the research and certainly a primary reason we have been able to do fi eld work at the Galapagos.”

The team led by Dr Haberle and funded by the Australian Research Council also includes ANU archaeologist Professor Atholl Anderson and PhD student Iona Flett as well as researchers from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral in Guayaquil, Oxford University, the University of Texas, the Norwegian Kon Tiki Museum, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.

The team returned in June from the Galapagos with core samples and other botanical material for analysis, in this first year of the research project. Cores of up to six metres were taken from a variety of different types of landscapes on the Galapagos – from highland areas, coastal lagoons and marshes.

The project will also pioneer a new dating technique for materials found in the cores, using high-resolution radiocarbon dating, which will be helpful to better identify “precisely when human impact on the island began”, Ms Flett says.

“This new technique will improve our ability to identify the timing of changes in pollen, micro-charcoal, sedimentation rates and other environmental factors from these cores over the past 3,000 years.”

The core samples of the last 500 years will be especially valuable to study the changes in the landscape since human occupation (over 20,000 people currently live in the Galapagos Islands).

“The native ecosystems of the Galapagos are currently threatened by extensive marine and terrestrial habitat degradation and have incurred widespread introductions of non-native species since the time of European colonisation,” Ms Flett says.

“The timing of these introductions and the natural fi re history is of importance to conservation in the Galapagos and we want to provide as much information towards that cause as possible.”

Dr Haberle said the project was a great opportunity for him and his team. “We are drawing on some great expertise in palaeoecology and archaeology here at ANU, we’re collaborating with international institutions, we’ll have information to help better understand the environment of the Galapagos, we hope to learn a lot more about migration of Pacific people before the arrival of Europeans and we’re pioneering some new techniques in dating,” he says. “All this in one of the most fascinating and mysterious places on Earth.”

Dr Haberle and his team will visit the Galapagos Islands next in the middle of 2006. They will travel to Cocos Island, Costa Rica, at the end of 2006.

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