Of all the archaeological conundrums that have engaged the imaginations of Pacific prehistorians, the most important is surely the Lapita phenomenon. Soon after Golson and his students began plotting the distribution of pottery bearing the Lapita style, archaeologists began to define Lapita as a ‘distinctive’ type of dentate pottery. Such descriptions suggest a stylistic uniformity not always realized in the actual archaeological record, since Lapita sherds vary in style both over time and across their broad regional distribution.
But even with such variation, as more Lapita sites were uncovered in the Bismarcks and the other Melanesian Islands, some sort of connection between New Britain and western Polynesia seemed obvious. Lapita sherds were in the earliest strata of Tongan and Samoan excavations, suggesting that Lapita marked the migration of people from the older settlements Melanesia to settle Polynesia. For many archaeologists Lapita pottery soon became associated with Austronesian languages and according to this view, the people who had Lapita pots became bearers of the Lapita Culture. As Peter Bellwood put it, ‘‘the Lapita Culture is the record of a number of highly mobile groups of sea-borne colonists and explorers, who expanded very rapidly through Melanesia in the mid-late second millennium B. C., and on into Polynesia’’.
There were three problems with this earliest Lapita model that have been at the heart of archaeological debate ever since. First, the concentration of Lapita potsherds was densest in the Bismarcks, where people typically had darker skin tones than Polynesians. How could archaeologists account for Polynesians having lighter skin than the Melanesians when the oldest Lapita sherds had been found in Melanesia not Polynesia? Some explained away this problem by arguing that Lapita pottery had come from the Indonesian islands where people were more copper-colored than in Melanesia. But no Lapita sherds had been excavated west of the Bismarcks, and even today the only unambiguous Lapita finds west of Manus are at Aitape, although Bellwood and Koon have suggested that a related tradition was found at Bukit Tengkorak, a very late cave site in Sabah (North Borneo). Others have argued that there was considerable biological variation already present in Melanesia, a random sampling of which could have produced the genetic patterns found in Polynesia today.
The second problem concerned the meaning of Lapita sherds. Pots are not people, and the presence of Lapita sherds across the region does not guarantee that the people who used these pots had the same biology, spoke the same language, or shared the same customs. On seeing similar sherds in both western Polynesia and Melanesia, Golson’s notion of an ‘early community of culture’ suggested a shared material culture as well as other cultural features that preceded an intrusive Melanesian culture. As archaeologists excavated more sites, they found Lapita sherds associated with obsidian (from New Britain and Manus) and certain kinds of shell ornaments. This suite of elements have come to be known as the ‘Lapita cultural complex’, a term of art that usually implies that all those who possessed these items were members of essentially the same cultural group that was ancestral to modern Polynesians. Some authors have accepted sites without one or another of these three elements - including sites lacking Lapita pottery itself - as belonging to the Lapita cultural complex. But as Terrell notes it is difficult to support the notion that every site with either Lapita pottery, obsidian, and shell ornaments spread out over more than 4000 km of the Pacific shared the same ethnicity, especially when humans had inhabited parts of the region for more than 30 000 years.
The third problem had to do with whether these early makers of Lapita pottery had intentionally set off to explore and colonize the previously uninhabited islands of southern Melanesia and western Polynesia. The distribution of Lapita gave credence to an argument that the part-Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) had espoused in his book Vikings of the Sunrise, since the distribution suggested a gradual and intentional expansion further and further into the Pacific.
Andrew Sharp had challenged the intentional model of settlement, arguing that deliberate sailing eastward into remote Oceania would have been far too dangerous. Thus, he argued that southern Melanesia and western Polynesia were settled through accidental voyaging by people blown off course. Sharp’s book prompted a symposium organized by Jack Golson discussing and challenging Sharp’s controversial views that contradicted the oral history of many Polynesian communities. More recently,
Geoffrey Irwin conducted computer simulations finding that Pacific Islanders settled only those places that were safest to find and return from. He concluded that by the Lapita period islanders had perfected their sailing techniques in a voyaging corridor in Melanesia. Most scholars now accept that exploration was unambiguously deliberate, careful, and more rapid than scholars had previously assumed.
Two key debates remain regarding the Lapita phenomenon: (1) where was Lapita pottery first developed or invented? and (2) how accurate is the assumption that the presences of Lapita pottery indicates an invasive, migrant population and culture?
Archaeologists have suggested three general theories or models to deal with these issues. The earliest model, associated most strongly with Peter Bellwood, Roger Green, Patrick V. Kirch, and Matthew Spriggs, is culture historical and holds that Lapita pottery was an entirely new cultural artifact in Melanesia, marking the arrival of a new and intrusive migrant population from Asia that spoke an Austronesian language. This view - following linguistic models - sees Lapita Culture or the Lapita Cultural Complex as originating in Taiwan, spreading into island Southeast Asia, the Bismarck Archipelago, island Melanesia, and finally western Polynesia. To address the supposed racial similarities between Tonga and Southeast Asia not shared by darker-skinned Melanesians, Bellwood, in particular, has seen this migration as extremely rapid. According to this model these newcomers spoke an ancestral Austronesian language. They brought pottery, horticulture, pigs, dogs, and chickens, as well as outrigger canoes that would allow them to explore the far reaches of the Pacific. This model sees Lapita culture as essentially homogeneous across its distribution, representing a single ethnicity from eastern Indonesia as far as Samoa.
Kirch finds support for this model in Robin Torrence’s excavations around Talasea in New Britain, where Lapita pottery first appears in the lowest strata after the 3600 PB Witori eruption. Note, however, that Jim Allen and Peter White have used this same evidence to support the second model that has come to be known as the Melanesian Homeland model.
The Melanesian Homeland model emerged in the 1980s following J. Peter White’s discovery of obsidian in his excavations at Balof rock shelter. The earliest occupied strata in Balof were unambiguously pre-Lapita and date to about 6000 or 7000 BP, yet more recent layers contained pieces of Talasea obsidian from New Britain. In later layers obsidian comes from Lou Island in the Admiralities. The movement of obsidian along 600 km of coast in the Talasea case and across 150 km of open sea from Lou led White to suggest that the Lapita phenomenon could have evolved gradually within the Bismarck Archipelago building on pre-existing trade networks.
Responding to Roger Green’s argument that Southeast Asians brought the Lapita cultural complex to the Bismarcks, White and Allen suggested that while ‘‘such contacts [with Southeast Asians] may have resulted in the acquisition of certain items and technological knowledge... most of the technological knowledge and economic aspects of the [Lapita] complex could have developed within a local context’’. In the following decade or so, Allen and White argued in favor of the indigenous development of Lapita pottery, tanged obsidian blades, and shell ornaments, as opposed to the introduction of these elements from the west. Following Torrence’s research there is reason to believe that volcanic eruptions actually opened up some regions to new settlement, or perhaps settlement by new communities.
This model was the impetus for a great deal of research under the auspices of the Lapita Homeland Project, a research program that funded or facilitated excavations throughout many parts of the Bismarck Archipelago, including the work of Kirch at Talepa-kealai on Mussau. Supporters of the Melanesian Homeland model accept that peoples who had access to Lapita pottery, obsidian, and associated ornaments were the earliest settlers of western Polynesia (especially Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa). But they see the origins of the elements that were innovative as due to local, in situ development in the Bismarck Archipelago rather than as technologies or items brought from Southeast Asia.
Jean-Christophe Galipaud proposes a variant model that sees Lapita itself, and perhaps the plain-ware so often found in Lapita sites, as introduced from Southeast Asia. But he sees the Lapita phenomenon as a cultural tradition, rather than as a horizon or just the presences of pots. These traditions involved a variety of elements besides Lapita pottery, all of which developed and changed within different parts of Melanesia providing a continuity that persisted even when Lapita pottery ceased being made or used.
A third theory about Lapita, called the Voyaging Corridor model, was suggested by John Terrell and developed more fully by Terrell and Welsch. This model sees the spread of Lapita culture as a much slower and more complex cultural process. Development of Lapita pottery likely occurred in the Bis-marcks, but following Terry Hunt this model sees Lapita as a kind of pottery that could as easily suggest trade or exchange among diverse peoples as it could identify common ethnicity. Since pottery was present in some parts of the region - such as at Vanimo on the north coast and at Dongan on the Ramu - before the development of Lapita not every community was as eager to adopt this style of pottery as others. At the heart of this model is the assumption that the northern coast of New Guinea, along with New Britain, New Ireland, and parts of the Solomons were already inhabited by peoples with great linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity that mimics the diversity found in these same regions today. Thus, Lapita emerged within pre-existing networks of trade and exchange that have always linked culturally diverse peoples. The peopling of southern Melanesia and western Polynesia almost certainly occurred after development of Lapita pottery and may well mark an expansion of human settlement out from the voyaging corridor of northern New Guinea and the Bis-marcks after sailing technology and skills had developed in the ways that Irwin has suggested. This model also finds support in recent excavations revealing an abundance of diversity ‘within’ Lapita pottery.
Most Pacific archaeologists accept one or another of these three models as a way of understanding and interpreting the Lapita phenomenon. Over the past quarter century, archaeologists have learned a great deal about the distribution of Lapita and its associated elements, but because of the vast area over which Lapita sherds have been found and the many possible additional sites where they might be expected according to these models, much remains unresolved. At present there really is no general consensus about the settlement of remote Oceania, except that people with Lapita pottery were involved.
One problem with the extraordinary archaeological interest in Lapita is that such research has focused narrowly on the past 3500 years of Melanesian prehistory rather than the previous 30 000 or 40 000 years. In addition, interest in Lapita has often been more about what Lapita has to say about Polynesian origins than about what was actually happening in Melanesia itself.
World History
