LiDAR shows that Pacific cities are older than once thought

New evidence from one of the first Pacific cities shows it was founded much earlier than previously thought, according to research from the Australian National University (ANU).

Lead author, PhD student Phillip Parton, said the new timeline also indicates that urbanization in the Pacific was an indigenous innovation that developed before Western influence.

“There were 300 earthly structures built at Tongatapu around the year 12. This is 700 years earlier than previously thought,” Parton said.

“As the settlements grew, they had to come up with new ways to support that growing population. This kind of design – what we call low-density urbanization – is driving massive social and economic change. People communicate more and do different types of work.”

The research, which was published in the Journal of archaeological method and theoryused aerial LiDAR scanning to map archaeological sites on Tongatapu Island in Tonga.

In the article, the authors argue that “the vast amounts of data produced by lidar provide a unique opportunity to integrate built environment data with approaches that include all sectors of past societies, and not just the social and political elite. The introduction of lidar as a tool to understand the built environments of the past has transformed tropical regions, resulting in a reappraisal of our understanding of settlements in these landscapes…’

“The highly accurate lidar data provide unprecedented data on Tongatapu’s built environment that will enable new analyzes of the built environment,” the authors added.

Mr Parton said traditionally studying urbanization in the Pacific has been difficult because of the challenges of collecting data, but new technology has changed that.

“We were able to combine high-tech mapping and archaeological fieldwork to understand what happened at Tongatapu,” he said. “Having this kind of information really adds to our understanding of early Pacific societies.”

“Urbanization is not an area where much research has been done so far. When people think of early cities, they usually think of traditional old European towns with compact housing and windy cobblestone streets. This is a very different kind of city,” he added.

“But it shows the contribution of the Pacific to urban science. We can see evidence that Tongatapu influence spread across the southwestern Pacific between the 13th and 19th centuries.