The Northern Mariana Islands were listed by the United Nations as a non-self-governing territory until During the colonial period, the Northern Marianas were variously under the control of the Spanish , German , and Japanese empires.
After World War II , the islands were part of the United Nations trust territories under American administration before formally joining the United States as a territory in , with their population gaining United States citizenship. The United States Department of the Interior cites a landmass of The other islands of the Northern Marianas are sparsely inhabited; the most notable among these is Pagan , which was left largely uninhabited since a volcanic eruption.
The administrative center is Capitol Hill , a village in northwestern Saipan. The legislative branch has a 9-member Senate and a member House of Representatives. The islands were settled around BC when various peoples migrated there. Eventually, the islands were claimed by Spain in At the end of World War I, with the defeat of Germany, the islands became a part of the Japanese Mandate under the League of Nations, starting in In , they elected a non-voting delegate to the US Congress.
The Mariana Islands were the first islands settled by humans in Remote Oceania. Incidentally, their settlement was the first and longest of the ocean-crossing voyages of the Austronesian peoples , separate from the later Polynesian settlement of the rest of Remote Oceania. The islands were first settled around to BC by people from the Philippines. After their first contact with Spaniards, the islanders eventually became known as the Chamorros , a Spanish word similar to Chamori , the name of the Indigenous caste system's higher division.
The ancient people of the Marianas raised colonnades of megalithic-capped pillars called latte stones upon which they built their homes. The Spanish reported that by their arrival, the largest of these was already in ruins and that the Chamorros believed the ancestors who had erected the pillars lived in an era when people possessed supernatural abilities. In archaeologists posited that the first people to settle in the Marianas may have made what was at that point the longest uninterrupted ocean-crossing voyage in human history.
