Atoll societies were originally characterised by fragility and vulnerability derived from the narrowness, low flatness and separatedness of the islets that make up the atolls. In recent years, in the context of the worsening problems caused by global warming, their fragility and vulnerability have been further emphasised, and they have often been taken up as the ‘front line’ or the biggest ‘victims’ of the environmental crisis. However, are atoll communities really weak, vulnerable and helpless ‘victims’? Such questions have already been posed to the world particularly by Japanese researchers who have led empirical atoll studies. In fact, human settlement in the Pacific was already confirmed in the atolls of Eastern Micronesia 2000 years ago, long before global warming was shared as an urgent issue. The question, then, should be how atoll societies have survived in a fragile world for so long. This study aims to answer this question by focusing on the specific atoll society, using an interdisciplinary approach from a diachronic perspective.

　The study will focus on Pukapuka atoll in the remote northern Cook Islands, Polynesia, for the following reasons. It is a typical far-remote atoll with a total land area of approximately 1㎢, more than 640 km from the nearest large island, Samoa, and more than 1100 km from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, and is characterized by its small size and remoteness. Its location in an area that has been strongly affected for thousands of years by climatic and meteorological changes induced by El Niño events (sea surface temperature fluctuations) that occur at multi-year intervals and the resulting changes in atmospheric circulation. It is located in an area that has been subjected to severe climatic disasters during the current environmental crisis, known as the Anthropocene. Its inhabitants have survived since early settlement with the initial conditions to cope with these risks. Ethnographic data from the 1930s-80s, albeit sporadic, and historical data from the 1850s onward exist, and basic data were obtained from ethnographic, archaeological, and geographic surveys conducted by the members of this study in the 2010s.