In attempting to characterize differences between Melanesia and Polynesia, Marshall Sahlins suggested that Polynesian societies were organized by hereditary chiefs and social rankings, while Melanesian societies were more egalitarian and typically organized by achieved forms of leadership particularly ‘big men’. Sahlins’s model was so compelling for both sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists that it dominated the Oceanic stage for a generation, leading few archaeologists working in Melanesia even to look for evidence of social hierarchy of the sort archaeologists had been finding in Polynesia. More recently, Bronwen Douglas and Nicholas Thomas have argued that Sahlins’s dichotomy oversimplifies social patterns in both regions, and some communities in Melanesia clearly had hereditary leadership.
The earliest immigrants to Melanesia (40 00020 000 BP) likely had an egalitarian social structure. But until 5000 or 6000 years ago, there is little archaeological evidence of any kind of social pattern; it suggests nothing about social stratification one way or another. Kirch, drawing on his model of the Lapita phenomenon, has suggested that ancestral Austro-nesian societies in island Southeast Asia were ranked. In his view, early Lapita communities in Melanesia were similarly ranked, and their descendants brought social stratification and hereditary leadership with them into Western Polynesia. Some archaeologists have found tentative evidence for social hierarchy, most notably an intensified economy and increased sedentism, but Pavlides has pointed out that these patterns predated Lapita.
Kirch interpreted Lapita shell ornaments as exchange valuables, but shell and shark-tooth necklaces from pre-Lapita Melanesia may carry equivalent ritual or exchange value. Pawley reconstructed two Proto-Oceanic terms that he interprets as ‘chief, or person of chiefly rank’ and ‘first born son of a chief’. But Lichtenberk reconstructed the same terms to mean ‘leader’ and ‘oldest child,’ respectively. To date only eight burials from the Lapita period have been excavated, and none of them are associated with grave goods. Hayden has argued that pottery is itself a marker of social status which, when first created, functioned as a conveyor of elite power rather than as a utilitarian good. The problem with all of these arguments is that up to now the evidence of social stratification has been quite weak. It remains an open question whether some or all societies with Lapita pottery were socially ranked.
Toward the end of the ‘Lapita period,’ there is more convincing evidence of social hierarchy, most notably megaliths that resemble those associated with social rank in Polynesia. Christophe Sand, for example, has identified monumental platform sites that rival the ‘megalithic’ sites of the Marquesas in size. Analogous remains have been found in ethnological contexts in the Loyalty Islands and Ile des Pins by Jean Guiart. Other sites have also been found in Island Melanesia in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. Some of these sites were quite large, such as a site on Grande Terre, New Caledonia with 100 structures, whose dense population alone suggests considerable social stratification.
To supply these populations the most extensive pondfield terraces in Oceania have been found on New Caledonia (the Grande Terre). Irrigation channels and mounding systems have been identified on New Caledonia and Vanuatu, respectively. Such mounding systems have also been identified in the Solomons and the Bismarck archipelago.
Most of these sociopolitical developments seem to be in situ Oceanic developments, rather than elements diffused from Southeast Asia. Several scholars have suggested that the Melanesian outliers had inherited a degree of sociopolitical complexity from Polynesia and that these traits were diffused into southern Melanesia (i. e., a ‘backwash’).
Such possibilities for cultural transmission from Polynesia back into Melanesia have given a much greater significance to the Polynesian outliers, who were much less isolated than early anthropologists and archaeologists had assumed. Although the Polynesian outliers may not always be the source of Melanesian sociopolitical evolution, the study of these outliers has undergone a dramatic paradigm shift from the ecological and adaptational approach of a generation ago to a more comprehensive approach stressing both material and immaterial concepts. The development of social complexity in Melanesia should best be approached as a multifaceted process driven by the complex interrelationship among many spheres of society.
World History
