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The Lapita Horizon and Traditions-Signature of One Set of Oceanic Migrations
... Most models have favoured a proximate Melanesian homeland in islands of Near Oceania (see especially Allen and Gosden 1991;Spriggs 1991), with some arguing for earlier origins in Island Southeast Asia and ultimately Taiwan (e.g., Bellwood 1997) or, as more recently argued, via western Micronesia and the Philippines (e.g., Carson et al. 2013). Regardless of routes and ultimate origins, the diaspora that carried people, traditions and objects across much of the western Pacific left behind a material record that is collectively referred to as the Lapita cultural complex (see Green 1992). Lapita peoples carried with them the capacity and technology for horticulture-but whether pigs, dogs and chickens were introduced by early or later Lapita peoples, or immediately post-Lapita is still being debated-and they are generally accepted to have spoken a proto-Oceanic language ancestral to contemporary Austronesian languages of the region (Bellwood 1979). ...
... Upon arrival in new locations they built coastal settlements, usually on small unoccupied offshore islands and along sand spits, often over the intertidal zone (Kirch 1997: 162-191;2000: 106-107;Summerhayes et al. 2019). Lapita peoples also produced pottery with iconic dentate-stamped motifs with a highly regulated design structure possibly drawn from other, perishable media (Green 1979). Within 200 years or less of the first dentate-stamped ceramics being made in the Bismarck Archipelago, north of the New Guinea mainland, they appear across Near Oceania and thence into the nascent archaeological record of parts of Remote Oceania (Specht and Gosden 2019). ...
... Following decades of debate as to whether the Lapita cultural complex represented an extension of the Southeast Asian Neolithic (Bellwood 1997) or an in situ cultural development in the Bismarck Archipelago (see Allen 1984), Roger Green (1991) developed a framework to conceptualise the origins of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago. Termed the Triple-I model, it presupposes that Lapita emerged out of a combination of intrusion from Southeast Asia, innovation within the Lapita cultural complex itself and integration of pre-Lapita Near Oceanic traditions. ...
The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008–2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvage program ever undertaken in the country. Yielding well-provenanced and finely dated assemblages of ceramics, faunal remains, and stone and shell artefacts, this remarkable set of sites has extended the geographical range of the Lapita cultural complex to not only the mainland of Papua New Guinea, but more remarkably to its south coast, at Australia’s doorstep. At least as important has been the discovery of rich and well-defined layers deposited up to c. 1700 years before the emergence of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago, providing insights into pre-ceramic cultural practices on the Papua New Guinea south coast.
Sites and layers interdigitate across the Caution Bay landscape to reveal a 5000-year story, each site contributing unique details of the grander narrative. Positioned near the coast on a sand ridge, Tanamu 1 contains three clear occupational layers: a pre-Lapita horizon (c. 4050–5000 cal BP), a Late Lapita horizon (c. 2750–2800 cal BP), and sparser later materials capped by a dense ethnohistoric layer deposited in the past 100–200 years. Fine-grained excavation methods, detailed specialist analyses and a robust chronostratigraphy allows for a full and transparent presentation of data to start laying the building blocks for the Caution Bay story.
Open access full text available at: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781803270883
... Most models have favoured a proximate Melanesian homeland in islands of Near Oceania (see especially Allen and Gosden 1991;Spriggs 1991), with some arguing for earlier origins in Island Southeast Asia and ultimately Taiwan (e.g., Bellwood 1997) or, as more recently argued, via western Micronesia and the Philippines (e.g., Carson et al. 2013). Regardless of routes and ultimate origins, the diaspora that carried people, traditions and objects across much of the western Pacific left behind a material record that is collectively referred to as the Lapita cultural complex (see Green 1992). Lapita peoples carried with them the capacity and technology for horticulture-but whether pigs, dogs and chickens were introduced by early or later Lapita peoples, or immediately post-Lapita is still being debated-and they are generally accepted to have spoken a proto-Oceanic language ancestral to contemporary Austronesian languages of the region (Bellwood 1979). ...
... Upon arrival in new locations they built coastal settlements, usually on small unoccupied offshore islands and along sand spits, often over the intertidal zone (Kirch 1997: 162-191;2000: 106-107;Summerhayes et al. 2019). Lapita peoples also produced pottery with iconic dentate-stamped motifs with a highly regulated design structure possibly drawn from other, perishable media (Green 1979). Within 200 years or less of the first dentate-stamped ceramics being made in the Bismarck Archipelago, north of the New Guinea mainland, they appear across Near Oceania and thence into the nascent archaeological record of parts of Remote Oceania (Specht and Gosden 2019). ...
... Following decades of debate as to whether the Lapita cultural complex represented an extension of the Southeast Asian Neolithic (Bellwood 1997) or an in situ cultural development in the Bismarck Archipelago (see Allen 1984), Roger Green (1991) developed a framework to conceptualise the origins of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago. Termed the Triple-I model, it presupposes that Lapita emerged out of a combination of intrusion from Southeast Asia, innovation within the Lapita cultural complex itself and integration of pre-Lapita Near Oceanic traditions. ...
The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008–2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvage program ever undertaken in the country. Yielding well-provenanced and finely dated assemblages of ceramics, faunal remains, and stone and shell artefacts, this remarkable set of sites has extended the geographical range of the Lapita cultural complex to not only the mainland of Papua New Guinea, but more remarkably to its south coast, at Australia’s doorstep. At least as important has been the discovery of rich and well-defined layers deposited up to c. 1700 years before the emergence of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago, providing insights into pre-ceramic cultural practices on the Papua New Guinea south coast.
Sites and layers interdigitate across the Caution Bay landscape to reveal a 5000-year story, each site contributing unique details of the grander narrative. Positioned near the coast on a sand ridge, Tanamu 1 contains three clear occupational layers: a pre-Lapita horizon (c. 4050–5000 cal BP), a Late Lapita horizon (c. 2750–2800 cal BP), and sparser later materials capped by a dense ethnohistoric layer deposited in the past 100–200 years. Fine-grained excavation methods, detailed specialist analyses and a robust chronostratigraphy allows for a full and transparent presentation of data to start laying the building blocks for the Caution Bay story.
Open access full text available at: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781803270883
... Most models have favoured a proximate Melanesian homeland in islands of Near Oceania (see especially Allen and Gosden 1991;Spriggs 1991), with some arguing for earlier origins in Island Southeast Asia and ultimately Taiwan (e.g., Bellwood 1997) or, as more recently argued, via western Micronesia and the Philippines (e.g., Carson et al. 2013). Regardless of routes and ultimate origins, the diaspora that carried people, traditions and objects across much of the western Pacific left behind a material record that is collectively referred to as the Lapita cultural complex (see Green 1992). Lapita peoples carried with them the capacity and technology for horticulture-but whether pigs, dogs and chickens were introduced by early or later Lapita peoples, or immediately post-Lapita is still being debated-and they are generally accepted to have spoken a proto-Oceanic language ancestral to contemporary Austronesian languages of the region (Bellwood 1979). ...
... Upon arrival in new locations they built coastal settlements, usually on small unoccupied offshore islands and along sand spits, often over the intertidal zone (Kirch 1997: 162-191;2000: 106-107;Summerhayes et al. 2019). Lapita peoples also produced pottery with iconic dentate-stamped motifs with a highly regulated design structure possibly drawn from other, perishable media (Green 1979). Within 200 years or less of the first dentate-stamped ceramics being made in the Bismarck Archipelago, north of the New Guinea mainland, they appear across Near Oceania and thence into the nascent archaeological record of parts of Remote Oceania (Specht and Gosden 2019). ...
... Following decades of debate as to whether the Lapita cultural complex represented an extension of the Southeast Asian Neolithic (Bellwood 1997) or an in situ cultural development in the Bismarck Archipelago (see Allen 1984), Roger Green (1991) developed a framework to conceptualise the origins of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago. Termed the Triple-I model, it presupposes that Lapita emerged out of a combination of intrusion from Southeast Asia, innovation within the Lapita cultural complex itself and integration of pre-Lapita Near Oceanic traditions. ...
The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008–2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvage program ever undertaken in the country. Yielding well-provenanced and finely dated assemblages of ceramics, faunal remains, and stone and shell artefacts, this remarkable set of sites has extended the geographical range of the Lapita cultural complex to not only the mainland of Papua New Guinea, but more remarkably to its south coast, at Australia’s doorstep. At least as important has been the discovery of rich and well-defined layers deposited up to c. 1700 years before the emergence of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago, providing insights into pre-ceramic cultural practices on the Papua New Guinea south coast.
Sites and layers interdigitate across the Caution Bay landscape to reveal a 5000-year story, each site contributing unique details of the grander narrative. Positioned near the coast on a sand ridge, Tanamu 1 contains three clear occupational layers: a pre-Lapita horizon (c. 4050–5000 cal BP), a Late Lapita horizon (c. 2750–2800 cal BP), and sparser later materials capped by a dense ethnohistoric layer deposited in the past 100–200 years. Fine-grained excavation methods, detailed specialist analyses and a robust chronostratigraphy allows for a full and transparent presentation of data to start laying the building blocks for the Caution Bay story.
Open access full text available at: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781803270883
... Most models have favoured a proximate Melanesian homeland in islands of Near Oceania (see especially Allen and Gosden 1991;Spriggs 1991), with some arguing for earlier origins in Island Southeast Asia and ultimately Taiwan (e.g., Bellwood 1997) or, as more recently argued, via western Micronesia and the Philippines (e.g., Carson et al. 2013). Regardless of routes and ultimate origins, the diaspora that carried people, traditions and objects across much of the western Pacific left behind a material record that is collectively referred to as the Lapita cultural complex (see Green 1992). Lapita peoples carried with them the capacity and technology for horticulture-but whether pigs, dogs and chickens were introduced by early or later Lapita peoples, or immediately post-Lapita is still being debated-and they are generally accepted to have spoken a proto-Oceanic language ancestral to contemporary Austronesian languages of the region (Bellwood 1979). ...
... Upon arrival in new locations they built coastal settlements, usually on small unoccupied offshore islands and along sand spits, often over the intertidal zone (Kirch 1997: 162-191;2000: 106-107;Summerhayes et al. 2019). Lapita peoples also produced pottery with iconic dentate-stamped motifs with a highly regulated design structure possibly drawn from other, perishable media (Green 1979). Within 200 years or less of the first dentate-stamped ceramics being made in the Bismarck Archipelago, north of the New Guinea mainland, they appear across Near Oceania and thence into the nascent archaeological record of parts of Remote Oceania (Specht and Gosden 2019). ...
... Following decades of debate as to whether the Lapita cultural complex represented an extension of the Southeast Asian Neolithic (Bellwood 1997) or an in situ cultural development in the Bismarck Archipelago (see Allen 1984), Roger Green (1991) developed a framework to conceptualise the origins of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago. Termed the Triple-I model, it presupposes that Lapita emerged out of a combination of intrusion from Southeast Asia, innovation within the Lapita cultural complex itself and integration of pre-Lapita Near Oceanic traditions. ...
The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008–2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvage program ever undertaken in the country. Yielding well-provenanced and finely dated assemblages of ceramics, faunal remains, and stone and shell artefacts, this remarkable set of sites has extended the geographical range of the Lapita cultural complex to not only the mainland of Papua New Guinea, but more remarkably to its south coast, at Australia’s doorstep. At least as important has been the discovery of rich and well-defined layers deposited up to c. 1700 years before the emergence of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago, providing insights into pre-ceramic cultural practices on the Papua New Guinea south coast.
Sites and layers interdigitate across the Caution Bay landscape to reveal a 5000-year story, each site contributing unique details of the grander narrative. Positioned near the coast on a sand ridge, Tanamu 1 contains three clear occupational layers: a pre-Lapita horizon (c. 4050–5000 cal BP), a Late Lapita horizon (c. 2750–2800 cal BP), and sparser later materials capped by a dense ethnohistoric layer deposited in the past 100–200 years. Fine-grained excavation methods, detailed specialist analyses and a robust chronostratigraphy allows for a full and transparent presentation of data to start laying the building blocks for the Caution Bay story.
Open access full text available at: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781803270883
... Most models have favoured a proximate Melanesian homeland in islands of Near Oceania (see especially Allen and Gosden 1991;Spriggs 1991), with some arguing for earlier origins in Island Southeast Asia and ultimately Taiwan (e.g., Bellwood 1997) or, as more recently argued, via western Micronesia and the Philippines (e.g., Carson et al. 2013). Regardless of routes and ultimate origins, the diaspora that carried people, traditions and objects across much of the western Pacific left behind a material record that is collectively referred to as the Lapita cultural complex (see Green 1992). Lapita peoples carried with them the capacity and technology for horticulture-but whether pigs, dogs and chickens were introduced by early or later Lapita peoples, or immediately post-Lapita is still being debated-and they are generally accepted to have spoken a proto-Oceanic language ancestral to contemporary Austronesian languages of the region (Bellwood 1979). ...
... Upon arrival in new locations they built coastal settlements, usually on small unoccupied offshore islands and along sand spits, often over the intertidal zone (Kirch 1997: 162-191;2000: 106-107;Summerhayes et al. 2019). Lapita peoples also produced pottery with iconic dentate-stamped motifs with a highly regulated design structure possibly drawn from other, perishable media (Green 1979). Within 200 years or less of the first dentate-stamped ceramics being made in the Bismarck Archipelago, north of the New Guinea mainland, they appear across Near Oceania and thence into the nascent archaeological record of parts of Remote Oceania (Specht and Gosden 2019). ...
... Following decades of debate as to whether the Lapita cultural complex represented an extension of the Southeast Asian Neolithic (Bellwood 1997) or an in situ cultural development in the Bismarck Archipelago (see Allen 1984), Roger Green (1991) developed a framework to conceptualise the origins of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago. Termed the Triple-I model, it presupposes that Lapita emerged out of a combination of intrusion from Southeast Asia, innovation within the Lapita cultural complex itself and integration of pre-Lapita Near Oceanic traditions. ...
The decoration found on pottery found at Tanamu 1characterises what Caution Bay’s early ceramics were like, both decoratively and, to a lesser extent, in terms of vessel shapes. The good chronostratigraphic resolution gives a secure starting point for ceramics in this part of the site, allowing us to ground the Lapita to post-Lapita regional sequence with a firmly dated assemblage, especially useful for the characterisation of transformations out of Lapita.
... It has been a long-standing narrative that the first colonisers of the Southern and Central Pacific, the Lapita people, brought with them not only highly decorative pottery, shell artefacts and obsidian but also a distinctive type of ground stone tool kit, which included fully ground stone adzes (Green 1979(Green , 2003. In Lapita research, identifying a distinctive stone tool kit has been useful for understanding factors beyond temporal classifications, particularly social values, which derive from assumed labour requirements necessary to manufacture some Lapita adzes as well as the distance raw material, such as obsidian, has been transported. ...
... Lapita adze typologies in the past have been used to detect commonalities between sites and to find evidence for a "community of culture" that the Lapita techno-complex is argued to represent (Green 2003;Spriggs 1997). There is an underlying assumption that typologies employed in this way might indicate the emergence of shared identities rather than a reflection of functional attributes and raw material requirements (for a critique, Best 1984: 391;Shipton et al. 4 Lithic assemblage from the Talasiu site Table 1. ...
... This paper presents the largest late Lapita -early Polynesian plainware period adze assemblage currently excavated in Tonga, which might provide some baseline data on the evolution of adze morphologies in Western Polynesia. Adzes during Lapita are claimed to be one of the defining aspects creating a "community of culture" for the earliest coloniser groups in the Western Pacific (Green 2003). Unfortunately, the evidence for a distinctive "Lapita adze kit" is scarce, with well-dated adzes a rare occurrence. ...
Typological and geochemical analyses of stone adzes and other stone tools have played a significant role in identifying directionality of colonisation movements in early migratory events in the Western Pacific. In later phases of Polynesian prehistory, stone adzes are important status goods which show substantial spatial and temporal variation. However, there is a debate when standardisation of form and manufacture appeared, whether it can be seen in earliest populations colonising the Pacific or whether it is a later development. We present in this paper a stone adze and obsidian tool assemblage from an early Ancestral Polynesian Society Talasiu site on Tongatapu, Kingdom of Tonga. The site shows a wide variety of adze types; however, if raw material origin is taken into account, emerging standardisation in adze form might be detected. We also show that Tongatapu was strongly connected in a network of interaction to islands to the North, particularly Samoa, suggesting that these islands had permanent populations.
... The colonisation of Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji in Southern Melanesia by Lapita populations about 3000 years ago (Sheppard et al., 2015) was accompanied by the spread of a Neolithic-type culture, whose earliest manifestations have been identified in the Bismarck Archipelago (Specht, 2007;Sheppard, 2010) up to a couple of hundred years earlier. The archaeological sites associated with this Lapita Cultural Complex (Green, 2003) are scattered across a vast region extending from New Guinea to Samoa (Fig.1). Besides the well-known dentatestamped and incised pottery vessels, the Lapita cultural tradition is marked by a distinctive suite of shell and lithic artefacts, the introduction of Asian and Southeast Asian domesticates, commensals and crops, long distance exchange networks (Spriggs, 2013), and an apparent homogeneity of cultural expression. ...
... Concerning Lapita subsistence economies, researchers were previously torn between theories of a strictly coastal exploitation of resources (or Strandlooper Concept, see Groube, 1971) and a model in which horticulture and husbandry were implemented from first arrival (the idea of Transported Landscapes, see Green, 2003;Kirch, 1997). Current interpretations strive instead for a hypothesis of opportunistic behaviour and a greater diversity of practices, depending on social, environmental and/or chronological factors (Kinaston et al., 2015a). ...
... Multipronged spears could also have been used to catch these bottomdwelling fish, as is the case today. Polyvalent fishing devices (see Kirch, 1997;Green, 2003), operable in marine as well as in freshwater, could have facilitated the broad-spectrum exploitation of all available aquatic resources (Clark and Szabó, 2009). These may have been part of an inherited cultural kit or a set of survival and/or colonisation strategies enabling Lapita people to demonstrate a remarkable adaptability facing new environments. ...
The study of the ichthyofaunal corpus yielded by the archaeological site of Teouma, Efate Island, Vanuatu, has revealed the unexpected presence of a significant number of bones of Eleotridae (Sleepers) on the site, as early as 2920-2870 cal. B.P. Out of the 8560 identified fish remains associated with the Lapita layers, which document the period of initial settlement of the archipelago, 1368 have been determined as belonging to eleotrids, including species of the genera Giuris, Ophiocara and Eleotris. They represent 16% of the corpus and occupy second place among the dominant families in an assemblage composed otherwise of a wide-range of marine coastal and reef-associated taxa. Even though the Lapita economy is characterised by an intensive and broad-spectrum exploitation of all terrestrial and marine resources available and readily procurable, the eleotrids of Teouma are the first clear evidence thus far of the exploitation of freshwater environments by Lapita communities anywhere in their range. A river and a swamp are present in the vicinity of the site, and hooks and lines and/or multi-pronged spears could have been used. Passive gear such as weirs, fish-traps or nets might have been applied as well, enabling the capture of sleepers in larger quantities. The results presented here offer an original insight of an unknown facet of Lapita subsistence strategies and aim to highlight the antiquity of freshwater fishing at a regional scale.
... Variability of material culture between sites has long been recognised as a feature of the Lapita cultural complex (Green 1979;Kirch 1997). This gave rise early to a view of the complex as a polythetic set of traits (Bellwood 1975: 13;Green 1992Green , 2003, with the distinctive Lapita pottery as the common denominator across its distribution. While other aspects of material culture and site location frequently recur at sites in Near Oceania and parts of Remote Oceania (Green 2003: table 5), there is no consistent suite of traits present at every site. ...
... While other aspects of material culture and site location frequently recur at sites in Near Oceania and parts of Remote Oceania (Green 2003: table 5), there is no consistent suite of traits present at every site. Explanations for this variability have invoked geographical and temporal factors and, in Near Oceania, the influence of populations occupying the region before the introduction of pottery production (e.g., Green 1991Green , 2003. Here we consider differences in material culture assemblages between Lapita sites on the south coast New Britain, Papua New Guinea, where two of the authors conducted research on the Arawe Islands (CG, with CP and GS) and around Kandrian and adjacent islands (JS) (Figure 1). ...
... We have canvassed three main possible explanations (sample bias, environmental factors, and cultural choices) to explain the apparent differences between the Kandrian and Arawe Island Lapita sites, though the paper is an exploratory step without necessarily preferring one explanation over the others. The Bismarck Archipelago is generally regarded as the Lapita 'homeland' (Allen 1984;Green 2003), but much of the discussion about Lapita sites there has been within the context of the settlement of Remote Oceania. Rather than view the study of Lapita sites exclusively or primarily in terms of this migration narrative, we emphasise the need for explanatory models for the Archipelago to address other aspects of the social dimension. ...
Variability in material culture at Lapita pottery sites has long been recognised, but is rarely discussed. Here we explore differences between two Lapita sites on Apugi Island near Kandrian and two in the Arawe Islands on the south side of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In the Arawes, the Apalo and Makekur sites have rich assemblages with shell fishhooks, and coral and shell discs similar to those found in Lapita and later contexts across Oceania. In contrast, the less rich
assemblages of the Rapie/Iangpun and Auraruo sites on Apugi Island lack similar fishhooks or discs. Three possible explanations for these differences are discussed: sample bias, environmental constraints, and cultural factors. While each may have contributed to some degree, we propose two scenarios involving cultural choices for further consideration: the selective uptake and transfer of new ideas between communities, and contrasting site functions between central places for ritual or trading activities (Arawes) versus unspecialised residential locales (Kandrian).
Keywords: Lapita, New Britain, Near Oceania, cultural variability, material culture
... Archaeological evidence suggests that the prehistoric exploration of the Pacific Islands was rapid and purposeful (Bellwood, 1978, Green, 2003, Irwin, 1992, Kirch, 1988b. In Pacific Island archaeology, the understanding of prehistoric colonisation and migration is continually changing. ...
... The initial colonisation event which brought people into Northern Sahul (New Guinea) 40 -50,000 years ago is still not well understood in terms of their motive for doing so, and direct evidence for this migration process is non-existent Page 37 (Fairbairn et al., 2006). However, the much later colonisation event associated with Lapita expansion has been a subject of intense investigation and debate among Pacific Island archaeologists (Green, 2003, Kirch, 1988b, Spriggs, 2000. ...
... Instead, it is suggested that the Lapita Cultural Complex developed as a result of social and economic development over the last ~40,000 years in the Bismarck Archipelago (White and Allen, 1980). However, archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence suggests a closer association between the Lapita Cultural Complex and populations further west in Island Southeast Asia (Green, 2003). ...
Migration is a widely used explanation for culture change in the archaeological record. In the
Southwest Pacific Islands, migration was essential for the colonisation of the island groups in
Near and Remote Oceania during the Lapita Cultural Complex (~3,300 – 2,200 BP). Lapita is
an archaeologically recognised cultural group defined by the presence of a distinctively
decorated ceramic tradition.
This thesis seeks to directly assess prehistoric migration and mobility in New Guinea and the
Bismarck Archipelago using isotope (87Sr/86Sr and δ18O), trace element (Ba/Sr) and nonmetric
dental trait analyses. Samples included in the analyses were from Lapita human
(Reber-Rakival and Lifafaesing) and pig (Reber-Rakival) samples in the Bismarck
Archipelago as well as from a post-Lapita human population on the New Guinea mainland
(Nebira). Isotopes and trace elements were measured in the tooth enamel of individuals
because enamel develops during childhood and provides a retrospective record of where the
individual lived while the tooth was developing. Therefore a shift in location during
adulthood can be inferred. On the other hand, non-metric dental traits are known to be
genetically controlled and inherited. Assessing these traits in prehistoric populations may
therefore allow individuals to be identified that have migrated from genetically distinct
populations.
The isotope and trace element data from the human individuals from Reber-Rakival suggests
that one young female may have been a migrant to the site. Also, several pigs were possibly
transported to the island from four potentially separate locations. No migrant individuals were
identified at Lifafaesing. The isotope and trace element data from the Nebira individuals
suggest there may have been nine migrants to the site from four potentially separate locations.
A group of five non-local individuals at Nebira potentially migrated from a coastal location.
The non-metric dental traits were only recorded in the individuals from Reber-Rakival and
Nebira as those teeth were from intentional inhumations. The non-metric dental traits
exhibited a similar pattern of trait frequency within both populations. While some patterns of
these traits showed differences between the local and non-local groups identified through
isotope analysis, there were no statistically significant differences in trait frequency between
the groups.
The variation in the isotope and trace element data measured in the tooth enamel of the
individuals within and between the sampled sites indicates there is enough variability to
identify prehistoric migration and mobility in a Pacific Island context, with a clear distinction
between island and inland populations identified. The similarity in non-metric dental trait
frequencies in the individuals from Reber-Rakival and Nebira may reflect interaction and
migration between genetically similar communities, but was not as powerful for identifying
migration as the isotopic data.
... The linkage has been explored through a combination of archaeology, historical linguistics, and human biology, with archaeological evidence frequently less privileged than evidence from the other disciplines. Reviews of the archaeological evidence from Lapita pottery sites (Green 1991a(Green , 1997(Green , 2003Kirch 1997;Spriggs 1997) have depended on linguistic and biological data to refute alternative interpretations of the archaeological data that favor instead degrees of local input and development through mechanisms other than migrationdriven introductions to the New Guinea region (Allen and White 1989;Terrell 1998). Over the last decade new data have become available within the western Pacific and Island Southeast Asia (hereafter ISEA), and issues relating to the origins, distribution, and significance of Lapita pottery and associated materials have come to the fore (Addison and Matisoo -Smith 2010;Anderson 2009a;David et al. 2011;Davidson 2012;Felgate 2007;Hung et al. 2011;McNiven et al. 2011;Sheppard and Walter 2009;Summerhayes 2010a, b). ...
... Lapita pottery has been found at more than 200 sites from northern New Guinea and the Archipelago, southward to New Caledonia and Vanuatu in southern Melanesia, and eastward to western Polynesia, where it is viewed as part of the Fig. 1 Island Southeast Asia and the western Pacific showing the main islands mentioned in the text and the division between Near and Remote Oceania (Green 1991b) foundational culture of the Polynesian peoples (Green 1979a(Green , 2003Groube 1971;Kirch 1997;Kirch and Green 2001). This pottery is usually inferred to reflect the arrival of people from ISEA who spoke languages ancestral to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family (Pawley 2007). ...
... In this model, the LCC comprises elements introduced from ISEA, integrated with pre-existing cultures in the Archipelago, and locally innovated through processes of cultural interaction and internal development. Following criticism (Allen and Gosden 1996;Gosden 1992;Terrell 1998;Terrell et al. 2001), Green (2000Green ( , 2003 modified the proposition, though its central premise remains the movement of Austronesian-speaking people bringing most elements of the LCC from ISEA (Summerhayes 2010b). ...
Within the Pacific Islands, the archaeological phenomenon called the Lapita Cultural Complex is widely regarded as first appearing in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea and then spreading southward. This complex supposedly represents the sudden arrival of migrants from Island Southeast Asia with new technologies, foreign languages, and a different worldview. We question these interpretations and the assumptions behind them and suggest instead that current evidence supports the introduction of new cultural traits over several centuries, rather than the sudden intrusion of foreign migrants.
... Previous typological studies of early Oceanic stone adzes focus on cross-section as the key feature (e.g., Best 1984;Green 1971;Green and Davidson 1969;Poulsen 1987). According to those studies, the Mesihsou specimen has a flat oval cross-section and is classified as an oval adze (e.g., Best Type II, Green Type II, Poulsen Type 2a), which is one of four forms, along with rectangular, plano-lateral, and plano-convex, identified as a Lapita-early Polynesian adze kit (Green 1971(Green , 2003 Table 5), and is found in Lapita sites from Watom in the Bismarcks through the northern Solomons, Fiji, and Tonga (Wickler 2001, 181). However, the Mesihsou adze is unique in terms of its size and morphology. ...
... Although the material was reported as being basalt by Athens (2018b), in our opinion, the possibility of it being an imported adze is high. Not only does the discovery location suggest its antiquity, going back to the settlement phase, but the oval cross-section of the adze (e.g., Best Type II, Green Type II, Poulsen Type 2s)-which is argued to be part of the Lapita-early Polynesian adze kit (Green 1971(Green , 2003 Table 5)-is widely found in Lapita sites in Melanesia and west Polynesia, but not Micronesia (Wickler 2001, 181). If this adze is of an early Oceanic age, it is probably one of the longest adzes reported from that period. ...
Geological analysis was conducted on a stone adze, which was accidentally dug up from an intertidal dredging site on a reef flat in Pohnpei Island, Micronesia in the 1980s. Detailed geological observations identified the material as metamorphic rock (schist), not basalt as originally reported. This result places its source in the continental rocks of Island Melanesia, most probably New Guinea. The location where it was recovered suggests an age that may well go back to when the island was first settled in the early centuries AD. The eastern Micronesian homeland is often thought to be eastern Melanesia based on linguistic and archaeological evidence. The adze, which may have functioned as a prestige good, was possibly brought from their homeland by early settlers or their immediate successors, or imported from New Guinea by them, suggesting that they still had interaction with the Lapita homeland region even after the decline of Lapita long-distance communications. This is the first artifact found at an early settlement site in Micronesia that is documented to be imported from Melanesia and sheds light on a possible early eastern Micronesian settlers’ interaction system.
... To date perhaps the best comparison between the findings of the traditional comparative method and phylogenetic methods can be found in the Austronesian languages. There are strong hypotheses about the origin and subgrouping of these languages derived from the comparative method, and robust dates for many of the main groups derived from archaeology (Diamond and Bellwood 2003;Bellwood and Dizon 2008;Blust 2013;Pawley 2002;Green 2003;Ko et al. 2014 (Blust 1999;Blust 2013) around 5,500 years ago (Blust 2013). The remaining branch -Proto-Malayo-Polynesian -spread south through the Philippines around 1,000 years later (Bellwood and Dizon 2008, Blust 1999, Pawley 2002, through Indonesia and along the coast of New Guinea. ...
... The remaining branch -Proto-Malayo-Polynesian -spread south through the Philippines around 1,000 years later (Bellwood and Dizon 2008, Blust 1999, Pawley 2002, through Indonesia and along the coast of New Guinea. By around 3, [0][1][2][3]200 years ago, the Austronesians can be strongly linked to the development of the Lapita cultural complex in Near Oceania (Sheppard et al. 2015;Green 2003) which brought a distinctive dentate stamped and red-slipped pottery style, a range of domesticates, and social practices. Finally, around 2,800-3,000 years ago the Austronesians settled Western Polynesia, paused again for 1,000 years, and then entered East Polynesia (Wilmshurst et al. 2011). ...
Historical linguistics has long dabbled in computational and quantitative approaches. More recently, new Bayesian phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology – which do not share the fatal shortcomings of lexicostatistics and glottochronology – have been applied to linguistic questions. This chapter reviews the history of quantitative approaches to language sub‐grouping and dating, and then turns specifically to Bayesian phylogenetic methods and their utility for historical linguistics. It focuses on four main questions: what is Bayesian phylolinguistics, why does this approach typically focus on lexical data, how is it able to estimate divergence dates, and how reliable are the results? The view taken in the chapter is that Bayesian phylogenetic methods are a powerful supplement to traditional linguistic scholarship – not a replacement. These approaches look set to become part of orthodox methodology in historical linguistics, as a powerful new tool to complement the tried‐and‐tested qualitative analyses.
... Several regional pottery traditions, classified into a series of 'Lapita Provinces', developed out of this early and terra australis 52 widespread pottery style, arguably as a result of a decreased frequency of interaction among regions (Green 1979:44;Kirch 1997:70). While the non-dentate-decorated and plainware pottery types, as well as the non-ceramic artefact assemblages and other components of this cultural complex, show a large degree of continuity, the dentate-stamped motifs and associated vessels dropped out of the archaeological record rather quickly, although in some regions they may have lasted longer than others (Green 2003). ...
... The Triple-I model, proposed by Roger Green (Green 1991(Green , 2000(Green , 2003, highlighting the importance of the three processes of intrusion, integration and innovation, has had a tremendous impact on current thinking about the Pacific's past. The Bismarck Archipelago is seen as the geographical location where multiple waves of migration to and from Island Southeast Asia occurred, representing a frontline where the local non-Austronesian-speaking populations had to form new social relationships with immigrants, be they hostile or not (see Kirch 1997;Spriggs 1997 for detailed discussions). ...
... To date perhaps the best comparison between the findings of the traditional comparative method and phylogenetic methods can be found in the Austronesian languages. There are strong hypotheses based about the origin, and subgrouping of these languages derived from the comparative method, and robust dates for many of the main groups derived from archaeology (Diamond and Bellwood 2003;Bellwood and Dizon 2008;Robert Blust 2013;Andrew Pawley 2002;Green 2003;A. M. S. Ko et al. 2014). ...
... The remaining branch -Proto-Malayo-Polynesian -spread south through the Philippines around 1000 years later (Bellwood and Dizon 2008;Robert Blust 1999;Andrew Pawley 2002), through Indonesia and along the coast of New Guinea. By around 3000-3200 years ago the Austronesians can be strongly linked to the development of the Lapita cultural complex in Near Oceania (Sheppard, Chiu, and Walter 2015;Green 2003) which brought a distinctive dentate stamped and red-slipped pottery style, a range of domesticates, and social practices. Finally, around 2800-3000 years ago the Austronesians settled Western Polynesia around 2900 years ago, paused again for 1000 years, and then entered East Polynesia (Wilmshurst et al. 2011). ...
Change is coming to historical linguistics. Big, or at least “bigish data” (Gray and Watts 2017), are now becoming increasingly available in the form of large web accessible lexical, typological and phonological databases (e.g. ABVD (Greenhill et al 2008), Chirilla (Bowern 2016), Phoible (Moran 2014), WALS (Haspelmath 2014), Autotyp (Bickel et al 2017) and the soon to be released Lexibank, Grambank, Parabank and Numeralbank http://www.shh.mpg.de/180672/glottobank).
This deluge of data is way beyond the ability of any one person to process accurately in their head. The deluge will thus inevitably drive the demand for appropriate computational tools to process and analyze the fast wealth of freely available linguistic information. In this chapter we will briefly describe one such set of computational tools – Bayesian phylogenetic methods – and outline their utility for historical linguistics.
We will focus on four main questions: what is Bayesian phylolinguistics, why does this approach typically focus on lexical data, how is it able to estimate divergence dates, and how reliable are the results?
... To date, the hypothesis that Austronesian peoples originated from Taiwan and then migrated through Island Southeast Asia and into Oceania has been widely accepted (Bedford and Sand 2007;Bellwood 1978Bellwood , 1997Bellwood , 2005Blust 1988Blust , 1995Green 2003;Hung 2008;Kirch 2000Kirch , 2010Pawley 2002Pawley , 2007Spriggs 1997;Tsang 2007). Some archaeologists further suggest that those Austronesian peoples in Taiwan originated from coastal southern China (Hung 2008;Jiao 2003;Tsang 2012). ...
... Oceania (Bedford and Sand 2007;Bellwood 1978Bellwood , 1997Bellwood , 2005Blust 1988Blust , 1995Green 2003;Hung 2008;Kirch 2000Kirch , 2010Pawley 2002Pawley , 2007Spriggs 1997;Tsang 2007Tsang , 2012. The ...
... As the title of this essay implies, my topic is on a theme that can only be addressed though an open-minded approach related to a group of explorers that expanded from Near Oceania to the previously unknown archipelagos of the South-Western Pacific more than 3000 years ago. Lapita has been described in general terms as a regional manifestation of a larger-scale Austronesianspeaking front, with early origins in Island South-East Asia (Green 2003;Kirch 1997) and cultural input from pre-existing populations in Northern Melanesia (Torrence & Swadling 2008). The diaspora can be followed archaeologically by the presence of intricately dentate-stamped decorated pottery remains in sites scattered from the Bismarck Archipelago to Samoa (Sand & Bedford 2010), a span of over 4000 kilometres. ...
... The pots are intimately related to a process of first settlement of new groups in previously occupied islands of Near Oceania, leading to cultural influences and innovations from/with the local inhabitants, before the move of a number of specifically "Lapita" groups to empty islands in Remote Oceania as part of what is clearly a wider, although complex, colonising history (Sand & Bedford 2010). A number of Lapita sites are characterised by permanent, multi-generational settlement and not just transitory occupations (Green 2003). All Lapita sites in Near Oceania appear to be "new sites" that do not replace immediately pre-Lapita occupations (Allen and Gosden 1989), although this does not rule out the possibility of "Lapita sites" created by populations of old Northern Melanesian descent. ...
... As the title of this essay implies, my topic is on a theme that can only be addressed though an open-minded approach related to a group of explorers that expanded from Near Oceania to the previously unknown archipelagos of the South-Western Pacific more than 3000 years ago. Lapita has been described in general terms as a regional manifestation of a larger-scale Austronesianspeaking front, with early origins in Island South-East Asia (Green 2003;Kirch 1997) and cultural input from pre-existing populations in Northern Melanesia (Torrence & Swadling 2008). The diaspora can be followed archaeologically by the presence of intricately dentate-stamped decorated pottery remains in sites scattered from the Bismarck Archipelago to Samoa (Sand & Bedford 2010), a span of over 4000 kilometres. ...
... The pots are intimately related to a process of first settlement of new groups in previously occupied islands of Near Oceania, leading to cultural influences and innovations from/with the local inhabitants, before the move of a number of specifically "Lapita" groups to empty islands in Remote Oceania as part of what is clearly a wider, although complex, colonising history (Sand & Bedford 2010). A number of Lapita sites are characterised by permanent, multi-generational settlement and not just transitory occupations (Green 2003). All Lapita sites in Near Oceania appear to be "new sites" that do not replace immediately pre-Lapita occupations (Allen and Gosden 1989), although this does not rule out the possibility of "Lapita sites" created by populations of old Northern Melanesian descent. ...
... Most island groups in the western Pacific Ocean (Figure 1) have been occupied continuously for around 3,000 years, a remarkable achievement considering that this required open-ocean crossings of 900-2,300 kilometres (Carson et al., 2013;Denham et al., 2012). In these island groups, the earliest discrete settlement period (hereafter the Early Period) is marked by the dominance of nearshore marine subsistence over horticulture, by settlements located in places where access to these resources was optimal and, in many groups, the existence of a distinctive material culture, including manufacture of intricately decorated pots, shell jewellery and perhaps woodcarving and tattooing; the maritime abilities of these first settlers are selfevident (Carson, 2011;Carson and Kurashina, 2012;Green, 2003). In the tropical South Pacific, the name 'Lapita' is used to refer to the distinct culture of settlers during the Early Period. ...
... The first people to settle these islands selected places where access to reef and lagoon resources was optimal (Nunn and Heorake, 2009) and often built stilt houses out across shallow water flats (Green, 2003;Kirch, 1997;Nunn, 2009a), a reflection of the overriding importance of foods gleaned from nearshore ecosystems to their subsistence. Yet as the Early Period progressed, sea levels fell further, stressing some important ecosystems and probably causing the extinction (or extirpation) of some key foods. ...
Societies that develop on islands in oceans, distant from continental shores and one another, are unusually vulnerable to fundamental change (collapse). It is argued that a common cause of such change is the effect of external (climate-driven) environmental forcing on food resources, especially those on which coastal-dwelling island peoples invariably depend. Relative changes in sea level that were comparatively rapid are implicated in several instances of societal collapse on islands; two examples are discussed.
The first refers to western tropical Pacific Island groups in which Early Period societies are distinctive, representing periods of human settlement beginning 3,500–2,800 years ago and undergoing major transformative change a few centuries later. The end of these Early Period societies appears to have been near-synchronous, an observation requiring an external and region-wide driver rather than local drivers. Sea-level fall, which began 4,000–3,000 years ago in this region, continued for some centuries and is considered to have dropped below a critical threshold about 2,570 years ago, abruptly reducing useful coastal bioproductivity and forcing the inhabitants of these islands to sharply reduce their dependence on coastal foods.
Second is the effect of sea-level fall during the AD 1300 Event (approximately AD 1250–1350) that rapidly reduced coastal food availability and resulted in conflict that forced human groups throughout the higher islands of the tropical Pacific to abandon coastal settlements in favour of those in defensible locations inland, upslope and offshore. On lower islands (atolls), people made use of islands newly formed as a result of the sea-level fall during the ad 1300 Event, while some islands were abandoned by people altogether.
External environmental change, particularly sea-level change, has demonstrated potential to force fundamental alterations to island societies and even cause their collapse. This situation remains the same in today’s more globalised island world, where some islands are likely to become uninhabitable within a few decades as a result of sea-level rise, while on others deleterious impacts on coastal food systems are likely to force coastal peoples to seek new ways of feeding themselves.
... As the title of this essay implies, my topic is on a theme that can only be addressed though an open-minded approach related to a group of explorers that expanded from Near Oceania to the previously unknown archipelagos of the South-Western Pacific more than 3000 years ago. Lapita has been described in general terms as a regional manifestation of a larger-scale Austronesianspeaking front, with early origins in Island South-East Asia (Green 2003;Kirch 1997) and cultural input from pre-existing populations in Northern Melanesia (Torrence & Swadling 2008). The diaspora can be followed archaeologically by the presence of intricately dentate-stamped decorated pottery remains in sites scattered from the Bismarck Archipelago to Samoa (Sand & Bedford 2010), a span of over 4000 kilometres. ...
... The pots are intimately related to a process of first settlement of new groups in previously occupied islands of Near Oceania, leading to cultural influences and innovations from/with the local inhabitants, before the move of a number of specifically "Lapita" groups to empty islands in Remote Oceania as part of what is clearly a wider, although complex, colonising history (Sand & Bedford 2010). A number of Lapita sites are characterised by permanent, multi-generational settlement and not just transitory occupations (Green 2003). All Lapita sites in Near Oceania appear to be "new sites" that do not replace immediately pre-Lapita occupations (Allen and Gosden 1989), although this does not rule out the possibility of "Lapita sites" created by populations of old Northern Melanesian descent. ...
One of the striking characteristics of Lapita archaeology during the past century has been the very limited number of preserved whole or nearly whole pots found in excavations. This appears odd for ceramics mostly interpreted in the scientific literature as non-utilitarian and carrying social or ritual symbolism. The clear connection between dentate-stamped pots and complex burial rituals at the Teouma site (Vanuatu), along with studies on pottery breakage carried out in other parts of the world, allows the canvassing of a theoretical model that explains the apparent absence of logic in finding numerous Lapita pots reduced to small potsherds. By positioning the analysis in a framework relying on the specific behaviour of Pacific Islanders regarding the “invisible” and by using ethnographic Melanesian rituals as examples of how “natural forces” can be controlled, this paper proposes a hypothetical reconstruction of one of the possible ceremonies that may have been practiced by Oceanic explorers in newly settled islands.
... The next datable record of people in the Jacquinot Bay area comes from chance finds in the Liton River mouth near Baien village (Figure 15), where local people discovered sherds of decorated pottery of the Lapita pottery tradition (Leavesley and Sarar, 2013). This pottery had with its origins in island southeast Asia (Green, 2003) and is distributed from New Guinea and its neighbouring islands southwards and eastwards to New Caledonia and Samoa. ...
NOTES ON THE E-BOOKLET VERSION TWO Between 2016- 2019, a multidisciplinary team of researchers1 from Australia and Papua New Guinea worked in collaboration with local communities to document the cultural values of the Nakanai Mountains and their inextricable link to the spectacular natural landscape. This research aims to contribute to a standalone nomination to the UNESCCO Tentative World Heritage List of the Nakanai Karst Area (NKA) and elevate its recognition as a cultural landscape of outstanding significance. The research team included both anthropologists and archaeologists. Further anthropological and archaeological research is likely to yield further evidence of the richly diverse cultural values of the area.
Between July 2018 - December 2019, researchers from James Cook University (JCU) in collaboration with postgraduate researchers from the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) were commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme2 in conjunction with the Conservation, Environment Protection Authority to generate awareness of protected area planning processes and to facilitate the gazettal of four Community Protected Areas around Jacquinot Bay and Central Inland Pomio. These protected area processes are ongoing.
... BP was, in historical and ecological terms, a momentous event in Pacific prehistory that nonetheless comprised only a relatively small part of the Lapita expansion in Near and Remote Oceania. In turn, Lapita colonisation was only one of several prehistoric migratory movements in Oceania that began during the late Pleistocene movement to Near Oceania (Allen and O'Connell 2008), with the frequency and scale of maritime movements increasing during the late Holocene (Anderson 2001;Green 2003). In this chapter, we situate the colonisation of Fiji and the Early Prehistory of Fiji Project results in the Lapita expansion, contrasting it with human arrival in western Micronesia and the colonisation of East Polynesia. ...
... In this paper we will further discuss ceramic sampling issues relating to the Reef/Santa Cruz Lapita sites in the Outer Eastern Islands of the Solomons excavated in the early 1970s as part of the Southeast Solomons Culture History Project (Green 1976) . These were among the first and largest well excavated Lapita sites and their analysis and position on the western edge of Remote Oceania has made them central to discussions of the definition of the Lapita Complex and its movement into the Pacific (Green 1979(Green , 1987(Green , 1991a(Green , 1991b(Green , 1992(Green , 2003Sheppard and Green 1991;Sheppard and Walter 2006). ...
... Given the uncertainty about the earliest stages of Lapita pottery development in the Bismarck Archipelago, I suggest that it would be useful to adopt a more general term for the period under discussion, and refer to it as the 'formative period.' For adherents of the Lapita-as-new-people model, the formative period encompasses the time required for the 'integration' and 'innovation' aspects of the Triple-I model (Green 1991b(Green , 2000(Green , 2003. The period witnessed developments in the pottery and arguably other elements of material and social culture that laid the foundation for the later dispersal into Remote Oceania. ...
... BP was, in historical and ecological terms, a momentous event in Pacific prehistory that nonetheless comprised only a relatively small part of the Lapita expansion in Near and Remote Oceania. In turn, Lapita colonisation was only one of several prehistoric migratory movements in Oceania that began during the late Pleistocene movement to Near Oceania (Allen and O'Connell 2008), with the frequency and scale of maritime movements increasing during the late Holocene (Anderson 2001;Green 2003). In this chapter, we situate the colonisation of Fiji and the Early Prehistory of Fiji Project results in the Lapita expansion, contrasting it with human arrival in western Micronesia and the colonisation of East Polynesia. ...
... Lapita movement to Remote Oceania is evidenced by a set of empirical patterns, foremost are the spatial and temporal distributions of artefacts appearing in previously unoccupied Remote Oceanic archipelagos. Although these artefacts are unambiguous signifiers of human movement, there has been over 40 years of debate about the explanation of this movement, typically with reference to genetic and linguistic data (Groube 1971;Green 1979;Allen 1984;Spriggs 1984;Green 1991a;Kirch 1996Kirch , 1997Terrell and Welsch 1997;Green 2003;Kirch 2010;Sheppard 2011;Carson et al. 2013;Leppard 2015a). The strategy followed here is to produce a description of the archaeological record of Lapita in Near and Remote Oceania and then generate an explanation of this record that is compatible with proposed explanations of related genetic and linguistic variation across the regions. ...
Migrations have occurred across the history of the genus Homo and while the movement of pre-modern humans over the globe is typically understood in terms of shifting resource distributions and climate change, that is in ecological terms, the movement of anatomically modern, and specifically Holocene, populations is often explained by human desire to discover new lands, escape despotic leaders, forge trade relationships and other culture-specific intentions. This is a problematic approach to the archaeological and behavioural explanation of human migration. Here an evolutionary and ecological framework is developed to explain various movement behaviours and this framework is applied to the movement of human groups from the inter-visible islands around New Guinea to the widely dispersed archipelagos of the southwest Pacific about 1000 BC. Labelled the Lapita Migration, this movement is explained as a selection-driven range expansion. The development of evolutionary and ecological theory to explain human movement facilitates empirical testing of alternative hypotheses and links different histories of human movement through shared explanatory mechanisms.
Full text link: http://rdcu.be/uh7h
... In general, Lapita designs comprise an intricate set of repeated motifs, typically produced by dentate stamps and found throughout the Bismarck Archipelago near New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa (Kirch, 1997). In the islands of Remote Oceania, from Vanuatu to Samoa (Figure 1a, inset), similar Lapita designs are shared across archipelagos indicating interaction between local populations (Cochrane and Lipo, 2010;Green, 2003). In Fiji, these designs were made for about 500 years between 3000 and 2500 cal. ...
The timing and choice of initial settlement location are examined on the small island of Tavua in Fiji’s Mamanuca Group. The mid- to late-Holocene sea-level retreat influenced the island’s coastal landforms through the acceleration of coastal progradation and the production of habitable land. Archaeological, sedimentological, and chronological data are integrated to better understand the island’s settlement and geomorphological history. These datasets are then compared with regional and modeled sea-level curves for Fiji in order to constrain the time period for the onset of coastal regression. The results indicate that Tavua was initially settled around 3000 years ago, within a few centuries of the formation of the coastal plain. Integrating archaeological, sedimentological, and sea-level datasets helps produce a more precise understanding of the relationship between sea-level change and the timing of settlement on small islands in Oceania.
... This model differs from the ecological shift model in that change in human behavior is not a response to the slow pinch of shifting landscapes, but rather a problemsolving strategy for coping with catastrophic seasons of inadequate drinking water and decimated resources. Dewar (2003) hypothesized that the availability of domesticated root and tree crops would reduce risk driven by rainfall variability, which in turn drives the availability of critical resources. This model has the added benefit of a more specific mechanism for change -water shortages and wild plant failures -when compared to the other models. ...
Why did people in the highlands of New Guinea move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and subsistence pattern, and develop a subsistence pattern centered on root and tree crop agriculture? How did the ancient residents of the highlands actually move around the landscape in the late Pleistocene, and how did that change though the Holocene? The research presented in this dissertation addresses these questions through and analysis of intensity of reduction of stone tools, paleoclimate reconstructions, and statistical analyses of regional radiocarbon dates. Competing models of processes driving change are compared against the accumulated evidence, with precipitation and other climate phenomena determined to be the mechanism with the strongest effect driving changes in site use, subsistence, and related technology.
... The proximate origins of this culture are in the Bismarck Archipelago where sites dating back toe3350 BP are known. From here, the culture spread through the Solomons chain to the Reefs-Santa Cruz Group, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and eventually into Fiji and Western Polynesia (Kirch, 1997;Green, 2003). In Fiji and further east increasing isolation is thought to have contributed to simplification of the decorated ceramics and some other artefact types (Smith, 2002). ...
Archaeologists have long debated the origins and mode of dispersal of the immediate predecessors of all Polynesians and many populations in Island Melanesia. Such debates are inextricably linked to a chronological framework provided, in part, by radiocarbon dates. Human remains have the greatest potential for providing answers to many questions pertinent to these debates. Unfortunately, bone is one of the most complicated materials to date reliably because of bone degradation, sample pre-treatment and diet. This is of particular concern in the Pacific where humidity contributes to the rapid decay of bone protein, and a combination of marine, reef, C 4 , C 3 and freshwater foods complicate the interpretation of 14 C determinations. Independent advances in bone pre-treatment, isotope multivariate modelling and radiocarbon calibration techniques provide us, for the first time, with the tools to obtain reliable calibrated ages for Pacific burials. Here we present research that combines these techniques, enabling us to re-evaluate the age of burials from key archaeological sites in the Pacific.
... The postulated drivers behind these transformations include a series of potentially interrelated factors, many of which have yet to be convincingly confirmed or tested archaeologically. They include trade system contraction, trade specialization, local adaptation, sociopolitical transformation, increased population density, and secondary migration (Green 2003;Green and Kirch 1997;Pawley 1981;Spriggs 1997). There is cessation of long-distance exchange and the development of more localized networks, decreasing hierarchy (as evidenced, for instance, in burial practices) and a major shift in settlement pattern at the intra-and inter-settlement levels (Bedford 2006;Bedford and Spriggs 2008;Reepmeyer 2009). ...
... Following this natural disaster, ceramic technology was adopted. Some authors see the appearance of pottery, and particularly the Lapita ceramic series, as evidence for the intrusion into the Bismarck Archipelago of migrants from Island South East Asia at about 3400 years ago, although others argue for continuity of population with the changes resulting from long-term cultural contact and other, more local processes (see review in Green 2003). The presence or absence of cultural continuity or discontinuity across the W-K2 boundary is therefore of particular importance to the wider debate about migration versus local development. ...
Studies of the technology and function of small retouched stemmed and waisted stone tools from late Holocene sites in central New Britain provide a powerful means for monitoring the effects of the massive W-K2 volcanic eruption (3480–3150 cal BP), after which pottery occurs in this region for the first time. Use-wear and residue studies show that these tools were used for processing soft starchy plant materials (tubers and wood) and cutting and piercing skin. Despite the catastrophically destructive event, results indicate cultural continuity, most likely by descendants of the original population, rather than population replacement or major cultural change. These results contribute to the ongoing debate about possible migration from Island Southeast Asia c.3400 years ago.
Filogenetik; biyoloji, genetik, kültürel arkeoloji, antropoloji ve dilbilim gibi alanlarda sıkça kullanılan, çeşitli organizma grupları arasındaki evrimsel ilişkiyi sınıflandırma yaparak sorgulayan etkili bir yöntemdir. Filogenetik, bireylerin veya grupların organizma evrimi ve çeşitliliğinin, ortak tarih ve ataları aracılığıyla birbirlerine nasıl ilişkilendirilebileceğini anlamak adına kullanılır. Evrimsel arka planı açısından, kültür fenomenin gelişimini inceleyen çalışmalar, Antik Dönem’e kadar geri götürülebilmektedir. Filogenetik yöntem kullanılarak, Darwin’in evrim kuramının etkisiyle kültür fenomeninin evrimleşmesini araştıran çalışmalar ise on dokuzuncu yüzyıl sonrasına aittir. Kültürel evrimleşme, doğası gereği kültürel etmenleri dikkate alarak anlaşılabilecek bir olgudur. Bu makalede ‘filogenetik’ yöntemin kuramsal altyapısı tartışılmış, bu yaklaşımın kültür alanına uygulanışını ‘dilbilim’ ile ilişkili olabilecek şekilde ele alan örnekler tartışılmıştır. Makale, Avustronezya ve Sahra altı Afrika’daki yerel dillerin evrimleşmesi ve maddi kültürleri arasındaki ilişkiyi filogenetik yöntem kullanarak tartışmaya açan örneklemleri ele alan ilk Türkçe çalışmadır. Makale, dilbilim alanında mevcut Türkçe literatüre nitelikli katkılar sunmaktadır. Makalede ele alınan, dil ailelerinin evrimleşme biçimleri hususundaki çıkarımlar Türkçe literatür için özgündür. Kültürel melezleşme, akrabalık tipolojileri-terminolojileri ve sayma sistemleri ile ilişkili olarak, Avustronezya ve Sahra altı Afrika’daki yerel dillerin evrimleşmesine dair çıkarımlar dilbilim ötesinde birçok disiplin için faydalı olabilecektir.
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A series of well-preserved Lapita sites was first identified on the small islands of Uripiv, Wala, Atchin and Vao, Malakula, in northern Vanuatu in 2001–2002. Further excavation on Vao and particularly Uripiv continued until 2011. The pottery shows the standard similarities with Lapita pottery generally but also demonstrates the development of very distinctive regional and even island-specific variation in form and motif design during the Lapita period. It suggests very rapid change in pottery form and decoration soon after initial colonisation of the archipelago; an aspect largely masked by the radiocarbon chronology. It also confirms that regional diversification was well underway during the Lapita period itself. This may relate both to the potential that these communities came from different origin points further west and that even during a single generation a range of factors may have encouraged localisation in a range of practices including pottery production.
The central concern of the present study is identifying the nature of interaction between the 2nd millennium BP communities along the Papuan South Coast that produced and used the pottery type known as Early Papuan Pottery (EPP). Until recently, EPP was the earliest known in-situ evidence of ceramics on the mainland of New Guinea, occurring between c. 2000-1200 cal BP. This was thought to reflect a post-Lapita colonisation event. Recently reported discoveries along the Papuan South Coast of Lapita sites (c. 2900 cal BP; McNiven et al. 2011) mean a re-evaluation of the nature of South Papuan colonisation and interaction is now required.
To begin meeting this challenge, a combined stylistic and physicochemical analysis was undertaken on a sample of ceramics spanning the full local EPP sequence that were excavated at the Oposisi site on Yule Island. The use of physicochemical methods to study pottery production and how this changes over time can provide insights into the nature of interaction within a society. When physicochemical analysis is combined with stylistic approaches to analysing ceramics, a more nuanced picture of interaction can emerge than could be obtained with either of these approaches alone.
The results of the present study suggest that, similar to a model of Lapita colonisation and interaction in the Bismarck Archipelago (Summerhayes 2000a), EPP society in the first 200 years was highly interactive and mobile, as determined from the use of a wide range of raw materials in pot production. As expected, this mobility appears to have then decreased over the next 300-400 years. An unexpected finding was a late increase in EPP mobility, as indicated by an increase in the number of clays being used by potters. Interestingly, the two highest periods of mobility during the EPP phase corresponded with the occurrence of the most striking types of decoration (shell impression and etching). Extending the argument of Summerhayes and Allen (2007), it is suggested that the elaboration of late EPP decoration might be attributable to intensified social ties between settlements in the Yule Island/Port Moresby regions, facilitating access to additional resources during a period of hardship brought about by the impact of increased El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) band variance. The previously published analysis of obsidian and chert artefacts from Oposisi (Allen et al. 2011) are interpreted here as being consistent with this model.
Consideration is also given to the relationship between EPP and the recently discovered Papuan South Coast Lapita. While it is no longer tenable to claim that EPP represents the first ceramic settlement of the Papuan coast, suggestions that EPP should no longer be considered a useful marker of a distinct period of social interaction along the Papuan coast (David et al. 2012) may go a step too far. The results of the present study are consistent with a continued argument that the beginning of the EPP phase marks a separate post-Lapita colonisation event.
Although seen as two geographic separate areas, Asia and the Western pacific have a long history of cultural interaction. This chapter explores the beginnings of interaction, and the exchange of people, plants, and animals over a period in excess of 40,000 years.
This multidisciplinary study draws on archaeological information, linguistics, and an understanding of mathematics. A summary of the background archaeology for New Guinea and Oceania provides some evidence of the longevity of these cultures and the archaeological evidence for the spread of languages in New Guinea and Oceania. The diversity of language groups is a result of movement, colonisation, influence and innovation over time. The overview presented in this chapter permits the reader to link the pursuing discussion in a time and place. The chapter finishes with an overview of the book that sets out the diversity of counting system cycles, where they are established, and how they may have developed.
The previous chapters focused on the cycles of the languages, but this chapter summarises the similarities and differences of the various phyla to indicate how different systems influence others. This provides evidence of much earlier dates for people in this region and a possible timeline with the known movements for counting systems to have been modified especially from the Austronesian 10-cycle. As a result, it is possible to dispute Seidenberg’s timeline and theory of the diffusion of number from civilisations in the Middle East. An alternate timeline is provided based on known events such as the end of the ice-age, uplifts and volcanic activity in island regions, the spread of Lapita pottery, and cultural developments. The variation in counting systems also provides evidence when considered in terms of the other evidence from linguistics, archaeology, geography, genetics and biogeography. Thus a possible timeline for the history of number is suggested indicating the probable antiquity of these counting systems from around 40 000 to 5 000 years ago in Melanesia.
Here's a hint about why scholars can be so captivated by what is basically an old-fashioned racial migration argument. They are apparently forgetting what they have been taught about the difference between a rhetorical argument and a scientific one.
http://sciencedialogues.com/articles/biological/racial-migrations-and-human-genetics-the-game-changer-in-the-south-pacific-that-wasnt-part-1/
The prehistory for the Polynesian peoples sketched in this chapter rests on mounting genetic evidence for a Lapita and Polynesian homeland in the Spice Islands. It rests too on recognition of the basic importance to the successful colonization of the Pacific of the genetic acquisition of cold resistance and famine resistance which conferred some protection against hypothermia. We argue that fundamental changes to the Spice Islanders’ physiology and an evolution of maritime skills and technologies accompanied their progression from local to regional to international spice trading. That the ancestors of the Lapita and Polynesian peoples inhabited the Spice Islands suggests a coherent relationship in their prehistory between economics, geography, history and genetics. This relationship is explored in this chapter.
Résumé
La découverte des premiers sites archéologiques du Vanuatu remonte aux années 1960. Depuis, les connaissances scientifiques et archéologiques sur cet archipel ont grandement augmenté. Cependant, les relations entre l’Homme et les différents changements paléoenvironnementaux du Vanuatu restent un sujet débattu. Afin de mieux décrire ces relations, il est important de faire un point sur ce que nous savons des environnements passés et présents. Cet article présente donc un état des lieux des connaissances sur la géologie, le climat, la biodiversité et l’archéologie du Vanuatu, de l’Holocène moyen jusqu’à nos jours. L’archipel du Vanuatu est relativement jeune et issu d’une forte activité volcanique et tectonique de la zone de subduction entre la plaque Pacifique et la plaque Australie. Le climat est majoritairement influencé par les relations atmosphère–océan Pacifique, déterminant les saisons humides et sèches. La faune et la flore sont principalement originaires d’Asie du Sud-Est mais l’isolement de l’archipel, la taille des îles et le gradient climatique entre le nord et le sud sont à l’origine de la présence de certaines espèces et sous-espèces endémiques à l’archipel, voire à quelques îles. Les premières populations humaines n’ont atteint l’archipel qu’autour de 3200 ans BP. Entre 3200 et 2900 ans BP, la culture Lapita, caractérisée par des poteries très décorées, est commune à tout le Vanuatu. Après 2900 ans BP, les cultures divergent et diffèrent d’une île à une autre. À partir de 600 ans BP, la culture polynésienne domine au Vanuatu dans les îles du centre et du sud.
We examine the Lapita colonization of east Fiji from the frequency of pottery designs. The design frequency analysis suggests that east Fiji was settled by Lapita groups emanating from west Fiji and Tonga, and long-distance interaction with archipelagos to the west of Fiji was inconsequential during the terminal Lapita phase when east Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were colonized. The results have important implications for understanding Lapita colonization elsewhere, particularly the extent to which migrant communities interacted and expressed identity in the varied physical and social environments encountered during dispersal.
Micronesia was initially settled from at least three quite separate points of origin and comprises multiple cultural and linguistic stocks. It nevertheless manifests a striking uniformity in its sociopolitical organization. I argue that these shared aspects of Micronesian societies diffused out of the Eastern Caroline Islands as a consequence of a prehistoric sociocultural efflorescence driven at least in part by the hybridization of two entirely different breadfruit species. The characteristic form of Micronesia's dispersed conical clans was spread throughout the entire region, carried along with the economic successes conferred by productive new breadfruit varieties. Botanical, linguistic, archaeological and ethnological data are marshaled to substantiate this argument.
Early Holocene shell fish hooks from Lene Hara Cave, East Timor establish complex fishing technology was in use | in Island South East Asia five thousand I years before Austronesian settlement Sue O'Connor & Peter Discovery of a well'Stratified fish book from a cave sequence on East Timor shows a fishing technology developed at least 5000years before the Austronesian expansion through Island South East Asia and into the Pacific. The fish hook is fashioned from shell and has heen radiocarbon dated to 9741 ± 60 b.p. Investigations at Lene Hara Cave In a previous report for Antiquity (O'Connor ct al. 2002a) the authors outlined the preliminary excavation and radiocarbon results from Lene Hara Cave, East Timor (Figure I). These results were significant as they extended the then known occupation on this Wallacean island back by more than 20 000 years. A maximum age of 34 600 i 630 b.p. (ANU-11418) was obtained on a marine shell sample. In 2002, further excavation was carried out at the site with the aim of sampling other areas of this extensive cave (Figure 2). In Test Pit A the Pleistocene horizon was directly overlain by an upper late Neolithic horizon spanning the last few thousand years. There was no physical evidence for erosion or removal of the deposit which would account tor the 30 000 year gap in the sequence and it was suggested that changes in sea level may have made the cave less accessible during the terminal Pleistocene and early ro mid Holocene (O'Connor et al. 2002a: 48). Subsequently a programme of direct dating of shell artefacts produced mid-Holocene dates of 4400 b.p. and 3600 b.p., respectively, on two small drilled beads recovered from the upper levels of the Pleistocene horizon in Test Pit A (O'Connor et al. 2002b: 19). This demonstrated that at least some tise had been made of the cave during the mid-Holocene and that downward movement of some Holocene cultural materials into the Pleistocene horizon had taken place. In September 2002 the authors returned to Lene Hara and carried out further test-pitting
Lapita pottery, the herald of the settlement of the wider island Pacific, turns out to have heen painted with lime and clay, to give a red and white finish over the decorated surface. The find of a pot in Vanuatu, its sherds in different states of deterioration showed why painted Lapita has previously gone unrecognised. The author suggests that it was widespread from 1000 BC and reminds us that pottery was painted in China 7000 years ago.
Biological distance studies, especially those based on cranial and skeletal morphology, continue to provide physical anthropologists and bioarchaeologists with an exceptional set of mathematically based methods for understanding population relatedness and population history. Because of the demonstrated correlation between phenotypic and genotypic similarities, studies of cranial form, most notably cranial measurements, occupy a central role in modern biodistance studies. This paper examines the results of multivariate statistical procedures applied to measurements recorded in modern and prehistoric mandibles from the Pacific, including the largest sample of intact Lapita mandibles from the SAC site on Watom Island, New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The results of this analysis demonstrate that the Lapita-associated mandibles from the SAC site are morphologically most similar to mandibles from eastern Melanesia and the Polynesian mandible series are closest to mandibles from Southeast Asia. As demonstrated in earlier biological distance studies based on craniometric data, the results of this new biodistance study support an ancestral Polynesian homeland in Wallacea and not one within geographic Melanesia.
Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans–New Guinea), bioanthropological/human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion—population dispersal linked to increases in human population size—is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500.
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