Dr. Mike T. Carson and Dr. Hsiao-chun Hung from Australian National University in Canberra, are on Tinian through a Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation grant.
In an interview with Variety yesterday, Carson said the grant covered three major areas in the Pacific: The Marianas, Taiwan and the Philippines.
Carson said, “We submitted our research proposal to the CNMI Historic Preservation Office, and permission was granted for us to proceed with the research as planned.”
Carson’s and Hung’s $70,000 grant would allow them to work in the regions of Taiwan, the Philippines and the Marianas with the latter as their first part.
Describing for Variety their work on Tinian, Carson said, “The excavation is landward (north) of the famous House of Taga site in Tinian, about 100 ft from the latte site. We proposed this location because it is where Fr. Marcian Pellett in the 1950s found a very deeply buried ancient archaeological site deposit.”
Carson said that Pellett reported finely decorated pottery that can be recognized “as the earliest pottery of the Marianas,” dated at other sites in Saipan, Tinian,and Guam around 3,500 years ago.
For Carson, “We have better technology and methods for a detailed study, so we proposed a large excavation in the same area.”
The archaeologists began work on Tinian on Dec. 5 and are scheduled to leave the site on Dec. 28.
As he accounted for the difference in ancient sea level at about 5.9 ft higher than today, Carson said their excavation location would have been very close to the ancient shoreline more than 3,000 years ago.
“The House of Taga itself did not exist until more than 2,000 years later, and its location was beneath the sea at that time,” he said.
Carson related to Variety that their excavation proceeded downward through layers of soils representing different time periods.
The uppermost layer, he said, contained remnants of Japanese and other recent materials.
He said beneath this layer was an ancient occupation layer associated with the time of latte-building and the nearby House of Taga site, tentatively dating somewhere in the range of 1000 through 300 years ago.
“Lower than that were other more ancient layers, each containing different types of pottery, other artifacts, and shellfish remains indicative of different time periods,” he added.
He said resting on the deepest cultural layer would be the finely decorated pottery known to represent the earliest successful settlement in the Marianas about 3,500 years ago.
According to Carson, “The decorated pottery helps toward learning relationships between the Marianas and other regions 3500 years ago.”
