Paths to knowledge: Connecting experts in oral histories and archaeology

The name of the village of Ngermid on the island of Koror in the Palau Islands is derived from Remith (Ngermid in Palauan), the Yapese word meaning ‘place of hiding’. In the early 1990s, a Yapese female elder recounted this history to me, and it was then independently depicted for me in a contemporary wood carving (Figure 1) by a young member of a high-ranking Koror lineage. These oral historical and artistic performances demonstrate two of the media through which experts perform and thereby retain and transmit important histories over the centuries. The physical sites of these important encounters are