Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia

Dinay Village, Yap

Yap is the most traditional of all the Micronesian islands; in fact, on Kosrae local historians say Yap is the place that keeps the old traditions. Most of my work in Yap has focused on the ancient village of Dinay, where, according to oral history, the gods introduced pottery and fire to the people of Yap. Dinay is one of the 34 earliest settled sites described in the oral histories. It is a very real place that shares many features commonly found in traditional villages, but it also displays a range of differences that sets it apart from all other ancient living places. One of the most important features in any traditional village is missing here: house platform names. Daf (house platform) complexes, their adjoining terraces and other accompanying features generally carry a name tied to an estate or series of estates, which are in turn associated with discrete lineages. These names are not forgotten, at least not easily. Villages that have been occupied for several generations, perhaps several centuries, still retain their house platform names. So, by extension, daf complexes that have no names are considered old, so old that both the names and lineage associations have been forgotten.

When I first went to work in the Yap Historic Preservation Office, I was asked to develop an archaeology program. The program was to focus initially on locating and documenting these earliest settled sites, with Dinay chosen as our test case. My work began with a series of interviews with several traditional historians, so that I could understand the oral histories surrounding Dinay and gain some basic information about what we would likely find on the ground.

The story:

In a time when spirits and humans lived together, fire was still unknown. The people of Yap would dry their main food, taro, in the sun on the bare hilltops (the savannahs). Dinay, like many villages from this period, were located nearby, under the jungle canopy just downslope from the hilltop savannahs; here it was cool and usually had a stream flowing through the drainage. At this time, food was eaten raw and tasted bitter; it was hard to digest. One day, a woman and her two children were placing their taro slices in the sun, when suddenly Thunder, Dira, fell down onto a nearby pandanus tree [in one version, Thunder, when descending, assumed the form of a thunderbolt; in another, it took the form of a rooster-rosters are equated with the sound of lightening, dirraa, and are associated with Dinay Village]. Thunder got painfully caught in the thorny branches, and asked the woman to help him down. She was afraid, but finally assisted him and he asked her what she was doing. When seeing the hard taro, he took two pieces, put them into his armpits, and they became soft and good to eat. Then, he sent the woman to fetch a branch of the hibiscus tree, and after having removed the bark, passed it through his armpit. He split the branch, sharpened one piece and made a groove in the other, producing a liog, a fire drill, which he put into use [on Yap, the two parts of the fire drill consist of the same kind of soft wood, contrary to fire drills elsewhere that consist of two different kinds of wood-a hard and a soft one]. On the fire, he roasted the taro. On the following day, he instructed the woman to fetch some clay, without stones, of which he formed a cooking pot, which he fired. Before leaving he taught the woman two magic formulas, one to make the pot last long, for a buyer who paid a good price, the other to cause the pot to break quickly to punish a stingy customer. Receipt of this knowledge-making fire and cooking pots-put Dinay into a unique position; it was now responsible for dispersing this knowledge throughout Yap.

I have worked at Dinay for two seasons now. The first consisted of an exploratory survey to identify, document and map the site; the second was an exploratory excavation to try to recover datable material (a task that proved to be more daunting than I had first anticipated). One of the most unique features at the site was a pottery oven (there is no other like it in the region; in fact, prehistoric era pottery ovens have not been reported from the region). Dinay also contained a diverse pottery assemblage that includes two new types of pottery for Yap that were recovered well below the occurrence of known pottery types; both of these new types are similar to the earliest pottery reported from the nearby Mariana Islands and Palau archipelago, and potentially extend Yapese settlement back another millennium or two, to at least the early part of the first millennium B.C.