Down the Stream or Up the Creek? The Economic Geography of a Dendritic Tributary/Exchange System in Micronesia

Abstract

Several political, social and ecological explanations of the "Yapese Empire", a tributary/exchange system which existed in the western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, have been presented in the anthropological literature. This paper briefly reviews these explanations, and offers an alternative, but largely complementary, view of the tributary/exchange system as a dendritic central-place system. This model serves as a heuristic device from which a synthetic understanding of the evolution and operation of the system can be developed.