We spend this class among the small yet delightful islands of Micronesia, especially in a chain known as the Marianas. Archaeologists aren't of one mind about the exact history of the people who initially populated the Marianas, but most suggest people first arrived from Southeast Asia, likely from Indonesia, about two thousand years B.C. The people came to be called the Chamorro,  and they developed their own language as well as a particularly stratified social structure that is fairly similar to that in place in other nations in Micronesia.   

The first European visitors to the Marianas -- consisting of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands --  arrived in 1521 with Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, sailing on behalf of Spain, which eventually colonized; over time an estimated 90%-95% of the islands' original Chamorro population either died from diseases they caught from the Spanish or married non-Chamorro settlers.