NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS
(Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Northern Mariana Islands)

Capital: Saipan
Currency: US dollar (USD)
Population: 52 263 persons.
GDP (PPS): 1 bln. dollars of the USA
Area: 464 sq.km.

ABOUT ISLANDS

The Northern Mariana Islands, also called Northern Mariana Islands, officially the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the self-coping commonwealth in cooperation with the United States. It consists of 22 islands and islands in the western part of the Pacific Ocean. The commonwealth is a part of the Mariana Islands, chains of volcanic mountain tops and the lifted coral reeves. (The network of the Mariana Islands also includes politically certain island of Guam, on the South).

HISTORY

Archaeological data in Chalan Piao on Saipan show that the Northern Mariana Islands were settled by the island people coming from Southeast Asia. They made a distinctive form of ceramics with red landing, sometimes with the inscription from a lime which is closely connected with the Philippine ceramics. In advertizing 800 the simple, unsolved ceramic style was used. Also the stone architecture which is characterized by parallel ranks of the vertical columns topped with hemispherical kapstona (halege) was developed. It agrees to the early Spanish bills, pillars were support for the structures called by latte (for which the term is called culture), which, perhaps, served as houses or a canoe. Each village had from one up to several lattevy structures. Tools from a stone and a sink were used, and nuts of betel were chewed that is shown by the expanded burials most often located between ranks of latte.

The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan was the first European who arrived to the Mariana Islands when he stopped there for a while in 1521. There is some historical question of what island he really visited, but Magellan called the island of Ladrona (Spanish: "Thieves") because while it was there, some of islanders took small the boat that it lagged behind one of the ships.

POPULATION

Locals of the Northern Mariana Islands are Micronesias. Only about a quarter of all population are chamorrom, descendants of initial inhabitants who mix up with Spaniards, Mexicans, Filipinos and other Europeans and Asians. About a third of people are Filipinos, and smaller shares are made by Chinese, Koreans and other inhabitants of islands of the Pacific Ocean. There is also small minority of karoliniyets, descendants of people who migrated from central Karolinov within the 19th century. About two fifth Northern Mariana's population is an aboriginal; small figures arrive from Guam, the United States or the nearby island states. More than a half of people - the nonresident foreigner, or guest workers, generally from Asia and generally busy in clothing industry. Since the end of the 1990th years the government tried to control and reduce number of nonresidents.