Connecting climate and human settlement in the tropical South Pacific: Insights from a lake sediment archive from the Southern Cook Islands

The precise timing and sequence of human arrival into the tropical South Pacific islands is contested and there is ongoing debate around the drivers of migration over the past three thousand years. Recent evidence supports the role of changing climate through palaeoclimate evidence that suggests that the South Pacific has experienced shifts between dry and wet periods throughout the human occupation of the region. Here we focus on the importance of relative drought, as islands are space and reso