About the conference: 

Island archaeology has long occupied a distinctive niche within the study of the human past. Literary and historical records attest to a perennial fascination with islands, emphasizing a dialectic between marginality and connectivity that informs both the physical realities and cultural conceptualizations of small islands.

Archaeology is drawn to insular environments to investigate fundamental questions of human settlement and adaptation, historical ecology, and biogeography. The premise that islands function as “laboratories” for observing long-term human-environmental dynamics remains a potent analytical concept, notwithstanding extensive critique and refinement over the last decades. The archaeology of small islands has only recently emerged as a subject of systematic, specialized inquiry within island studies.

A burgeoning corpus of interdisciplinary research— particularly regarding small, often uninhabited islands in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and elsewhere—has leveraged diverse theoretical viewpoints and interpretations. The resulting empirical wealth underscores the varied functional and symbolic roles these islands played across disparate temporal and spatial scales—roles that now call for rigorous comparative synthesis. Micronesia aims to interrogate how small islands were inhabited or utilized from the Palaeolithic through the 21st century. 

The conference is funded by a Collaborative Research Convening Grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (HFRI). It aims to bring together scholars from the US, Greece, and elsewhere, in order to address questions relevant to small-island archaeology in one of the world’s densest and most historically significant small-island theaters.