Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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This aligns with the idea that Rapa Nui was the stepping stone via which Polynesians and Native Americans made contact, traded crops, and had kids together. I wonder if there was ever a minority NA population on the island alongside Polynesians or if it was just occasional mixed kids raised fully Polynesian.
That's an interesting hypothesis and definitively worth checking, but I personally find unlikely that Rapa Nui had any sort of meaningful (in numbers) Native American minority - there's practically no material pressure to do so.
It was a similar distance from there to the nearest Polynesian island, and we know they maintained contact and trade that direction. South America would've offered entirely unique trade goods, so I don't think it's out of the question at all. These were history's greatest sailors and navigators, after all.
Certainly 10% DNA admixture requires more than just a few small interactions.
I do think that it was more than just a few small interactions, but I don't think that they happened in Rapa Nui island, or that they got the chance to develop an Amerindian minority there. I think that, instead, the Polynesians had small coastal settlements here in South America, used for trade.
So those 10% admixture would be like in your other hypothesis - mixed kids raised Polynesian.
The key is that what you said is true for the Polynesians, but not for the Amerindians - from the Polynesians' PoV the Amerindians were a big cluster of potential trading partners with exotic resources, but from the Amerindians' PoV it was just a small island in the middle of nowhere, that could be only safely reached by knowing how to navigate the oceans - and at least Andean Amerindians likely didn't know how to do it, as they were way more focused on land-based tech (terrace farming, road building, freeze-drying...).
That makes a lot of sense! Agreed that that's more likely. Though those settlements would've been pretty transient and/or small since we have nothing in the archaeological record. And no pigs.