  The Bourewa beach site on the Rove Peninsula of Viti Levu is the earliest
known human settlement in the Fiji Islands. How did the settlement at Bourewa
develop in space and time? We have radiocarbon dates on sixty specimens, found
in association with evidence for human presence, taken from pits across the
site. Owing to the lack of diagnostic stratigraphy, there is no direct
archaeological evidence for distinct phases of occupation through the period of
interest. We give a spatio-temporal analysis of settlement at Bourewa in which
the deposition rate for dated specimens plays an important role.
Spatio-temporal mapping of radiocarbon date intensity is confounded by uneven
post-depositional thinning. We assume that the confounding processes act in
such a way that the absence of dates remains informative of zero rate for the
original deposition process. We model and fit the onset-field, that is, we
estimate for each location across the site the time at which deposition of
datable specimens began. The temporal process generating our spatial
onset-field is a model of the original settlement dynamics.
