Theory

Conventional explanations of Pacific prehistory are global exemplars of migrationist culture history, and suffered little from the ‘retreat from migrationism’ that accompanied the rise of processual theory in the late twentieth century. In part this is because of the inescapable fact that an island world such as the Pacific could only have been settled by migration. In the case of Remote Oceania, uninhabited prior to the appearance of Lapita, it also seems obvious that this migration involved culturally, biologically, and linguistically closely-related people. Most criticism has focused on attempts to push the situation in East and South Polynesia, where this was undoubtedly the case, backward to cover the Lapita phenomenon in Melanesia and West Polynesia.

While there is little doubt the latter reflects some sort of migration of the descendants of Southeast Asian and Melanesian people, there has been considerable debate concerning the dynamics and long-term consequences of their dispersal through the New Guinea region in particular. The consensus is that many characteristics of modern coastal and island cultures in Melanesia stem from contact between existing communities and Southeast Asian people who, in addition to introducing pottery and Austronesian languages, brought with them a package of cultural innovations incorporating ‘full-blown’ agriculture, efficient ocean-going watercraft which enabled longdistance interaction, and perhaps a weakly hierarchical sociopolitical order, as they migrated rapidly through the region.

For many researchers, such features put the Lapita phenomenon on par with the world’s other major agricultural dispersals. There are empirical and theoretical alternatives, however. Empirically, there is considerable evidence that the ethnographically known cultures of Near Oceania are the products of very long-term trajectories of change. It might well be that Southeast Asian people introduced pottery technology, Austronesian languages, and possibly certain sociopolitical institutions to Melanesia. It is also true, though, that the existence of very early islands sites shows open-ocean travel has a Pleistocene history in the region, that data from New Guinea and the Bis-marcks suggest agriculture may have been established by the Early Holocene and that the presence of New Britain obsidian in Pleistocene sites far distant from its sources shows long-distance interaction networks were developed well before the Austronesian expansion into Melanesia.

At a theoretical level, the argument has long been that culture history is a conceptually impoverished approach that ought to be replaced by a less tidy but intellectually more rigorous and empirically more accurate processual model that separates language, biology, and culture rather than attempting to join them in a seamless historical narrative. There is a moral dimension as well, based on the assertion that the conventional culture history descends from and perpetuates racist myths separating the brutish inhabitants of Melanesia (i. e., the ‘black islands’) from the fairer-skinned and culturally more elevated Polynesians.

Similar attempts have been made to deconstruct conventional models of West Polynesian prehistory, and especially the so-called phylogenetic model of ancestral Polynesian society. The contention is that such models are undermined by a growing number of empirical inconsistencies, but that these are ignored owing to the strength of expectations generated by historical linguistics and biology (especially genetics). A hypothetical alternative sequence for West Polynesia argues for a high degree of continuity between the Lapita and post-Lapita periods and suggests that the characteristics of Polynesian societies recorded by European observers may have arisen only within the last millennium.

While acknowledging the empirical and theoretical issues at stake, some scholars have sought to enliven debate by approaching Lapita and other aspects of Pacific migration from fresh perspectives. One attempt to meld aspects of the indigenist and migra-tionist stances on Lapita origins and explain how Southeast Asian and Melanesian cultural elements could be integrated with entirely novel developments in a coherent whole proposes that the Lapita complex began as a diaspora in the sociological sense, produced by processes of hybridization and creolization in the Bismarcks. These processes gave rise to a culturally distinctive social formation which allowed dispersed and highly mobile peoples to remain socially cohesive owing to a unifying ideology materialized in their elaborately decorated ceramics. Another model focusing on the colonization of Remote Oceania distinguishes colonization from migration, in which the destination as well as the source of the population movement are inhabited. Each produces a distinctive pattern of cultural evolution: colonization, or dispersal, follows a pattern consistent with the phylogenetic approach to the settlement of East Polynesia, while migration is a reticulate process more like that described by the diaspora hypothesis.