It’s almost all over for us here in Aleipata, investigating the coastline’s prehistory. Our final archaeological test pit uncovered the paleobeach we’ve been seeing in most places, with a silty-sand layer on top that had a few midden shells, a lithic, and a piece of plainware pottery.

I think that’s a pretty nice looking paleobeach. Coring down through this after excavation we got to a layer with increased basalt sands suggesting we were approaching the Pleistocene bedrock.
We’ve made a pretty good go of it: four 2 x 1 m controlled units, about 60 auger cores (since 2013). We are consistently getting a thin cultural layer with minimal artefacts and plainware pottery on top of carbonate beach, likely on top of basalt (Pleistocene?) bedrock. If the UH geologists come back with a mid-holocene date for the subsurface beach this will *suggest* that there were no Lapita-bearing populations here, even though the landscape was available. Pretty interesting stuff.

Panoramic view of the human-made embankment stretching across a ridge between two drainages. This is about a kilometer inland from Satitoa Village in the uplands
We went inland today to explore possible upland deposits and came across a great ditch and bank system that was likely defensive. These are found all over Samoa (and elsewhere) and may date to the last 1000 to 500 years.