About NAO

NAO [/naʊ/]: ship used by the Iberians for explorations during the 16th and 17th centuries. / Generic name for a ship.

NAO, Networks Across Oceania, points to the ships as vectors that connected both sides of the Pacific, and gave way to the Transpacific world. Thus NAO emphasizes the Pacific a network of places before and after the 16th century.

NAO’s questions can be summarized as which were the impacts on Pacific Island populations and environments, of the recurrent and sometimes intense colonial contacts in the 16th and 17th centuries AD? Most importantly, how can we address this historical problem?

Mainstream historiography, both traditional and critical of Eurocentrism (Cruz Berrocal 2017), conceive the Pacific as an isolated and pristine region until the explorations of Enlightened travelers opened it to global history, mainly through James Cook’s epic and famous voyages (eg. Campbell 1996; Kirch 2000; Boulay 2005; Wolff 2007; Sand 2002). This rhetoric constitutes the historical paradigm that rules Pacific studies (and literature, and popular culture…). This oversizing of Cook’s endeavors has overlooked the existence and extent of earlier encounters between indigenous populations and Europeans (Spanish, Portuguese and much less, Dutch) in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Just an enumeration of the early European expeditions could rise doubts about the post-Cook narrative: 19 Spanish and Dutch expeditions crossed the Pacific between 1521 CE -when the Spanish reached the Mariana Islands and later the Philippines- and 1606 CE -last attempts to colonize Melanesia-. More than 200 places were sighted (implying reciprocal sighting by the locals), contacted or settled in this period. The Manila Galleon was launched in 1565; Manila was founded in 1571; colonies established in Santa Cruz (Nendö) (Solomon Islands) in 1567 and 1595, in Vanuatu in 1606, Taiwan in 1626, and the Marianas in 1668.

These colonial enterprises in the Pacific failed in several occasions, but this does not make them the less colonial or less dramatic for the local populations.

Indeed the main contradiction in the dominant paradigm is this: even short contact episodes in the late 18th century and early 19th century are deemed to have shaped the history of the entire region, causing enormous epidemics. An example is:

“In many island societies intensification was very much an ongoing process when European contact interrupted the pace of history, primarily through the introduction of foreign diseases that undermined economies, decimating their population bases”

(Kirch 2000: 320)

Kirch is referring to the post-Cook contact. However, the consequences that the local peoples suffered through the early colonial episodes have never been systematically investigated. But they cannot have been very different.

Spriggs (1997: 234) hinted the problem this way:

“Could the depopulation of these areas [in the Solomons], extreme even in comparison with other areas of Island Melanesia, have begun with the impact of the Spanish themselves? Diseases common enough among Europeans not to merit comment in the accounts, may have been devastating when introduced to a population with no exposure and, therefore, no resistance to them. The Spanish did not stay long enough in the islands to observe the effects of any such introductions. They note that in all areas the local people appeared healthy and without any evident medical conditions. Later accounts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries paint a quite different picture in some areas, and the catastrophic effects of the introduction of diseases by passing ships is well documented for that era. (…) Future archaeological projects directed at (…) the areas visited by the Spaniards should allow us to establish whether in fact the decline in population is a phenomenon begun in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries rather than the nineteenth century.”

Archaeological research on Iberian colonialism in the Pacific has developed for several decades now (eg. Allen and Green 1972; Dickinson and Green 1973; Green 1973; Allen 1976; Bedford et al. 2009; Gibbs 2011; McKinnon and Raupp 2011; Blake et al. 2015; Gibbs et al. 2015; Gibbs 2016; Kelloway 2015; Kelloway et al. 2016; Bayman 2017; Flexner and Spriggs 2017; Montón et al. 2020). These are mostly study cases of settlements. NAO has for the first time systematically formulated the problem for the Pacific, compiled scattered evidence, and addressed the implications of such a paradigm change. Among these implications lie a very simple one: the possibility that early Iberian colonialism shaped second-wave European colonialism in late modernity has simply never been explored. However, this novel assumption represents a turn in the understanding of history in the Pacific.

Methodology

The limits of the very conventional archaeology developed so far have been revealed: the excavations have rendered little evidence in the sites where the Europeans settled in Graciosa Bay (Gibbs 2016) and Vanuatu (Bedford et al 2009; Flexner and Spriggs 2017). In Vanuatu, some Spanish material (sherds from one Spanish botija or olive jar), probably from Quirós’ expedition, has been found further north in the Banks Islands (Bedford et al. 2009: 78-84), but nothing on the original colony of Espíritu Santo. The materials in the Banks Islands had probably been incorporated into local trade networks and dispersed from Espíritu Santo, possibly as prestige goods given their exotic origins (Flexner et al. 2016).

Thus, an originally weak material presence is further made invisible by the local social practices. In this way, historical archaeology on this topic, extremely focused on potential recovering of objects from early Iberian colonists, remains incapable of developing an account of historical processes.

Within NAO, through multiple field work seasons on different islands, we have developed particular methodological strategies than can tackle testing of our hypothesis, ie. that early European colonial interaction in different archipelagos was bound to have left a mark on local populations, similarly to what the second-wave European colonialism did.

NAO uses proxies to approximate the impact of early colonialism in the Pacific and its aftermath: plants, animals, and human pathogens were, no doubt, conscious or accidental introductions that travel in the Iberian ships. All of them are likely to have had a significant, if not dramatic, impact on local ecosystems and humans. Thus, together with an exhaustive sampling program targeting newly introduced species in the islands (plants, animals, and even pathogens on human bones), we focus on the effects of the introduction of diseases. For this reason, the first objective when a project is launched is to systematically and thoroughly analyze the settlement patterns on the island, and their shifts through time.

So far, field work in study cases in Fiji, Wallis et Futuna, and the Mariana islands have been implemented by NAO.

Besides these case studies, we have developed research in Heping Dao (Keelung, Taiwan) since 2011, excavating the former Spanish colony of San Salvador de Quelang.