Assessing settlement diversity in Sāmoa

The structure of human settlement is impacted by, and impacts notions of, territoriality and cooperation. These social dynamics intersect with environmental variability to produce patterns in the archaeological record. Given the substantial environmental variation that exists within individual archipelagos, we should expect variation in human settlement structure at that scale of analysis, with important implications for the political and social relationships of inhabitants in those settlements. We evaluate these questions in Sāmoa, an archipelago with a long history of landscape-scale archaeological investigation and a well-defined environmental gradient. We find more robust archaeological signatures of territorial behavior in the western islands of the archipelago where larger settlement units are also found. The latter likely allowed for larger social communities and, hence, cooperative labor forcing, an inference supported by the scale of monumental architecture. In contrast, the eastern islands feature smaller, but more nucleated communities with limited evidence of territoriality. In each case, public goods were localized, speaking to a general lack of durable political control beyond individual settlements, though multi-island social influence and prestige are well-attested ethnographically.