Glossary

Applied relief Decoration created by adding clay strips, knobs and so on to the surface of a pot before firing, often with incised decoration and sometimes itself incised.

Calibration Adjustment of dates to match calendar years, required because of variation introduced by different forms of dating and based on rigorous cross-dating of timber of known age.

Gracility Relatively light physique.

Holocene The current geological epoch, beginning at the end of the last glaciation some 10 000-15 000 years ago.

Hominids Primates in the human line (i. e., the genus Homo).

Incised Decoration cut into the surface of a pot before firing.

Luminescence A dating technique measuring the strength of residual light energy captured in quartz crystals exposed to the sun then buried or otherwise concealed from light.

Megafauna Generally but not always large species of animals closely related to those alive now, mostly but not inevitably now extinct and including reptiles (e. g., giant monitor lizards) and birds (e. g., ratites such as New Zealand moa) as well as mammals.

Melanesia (the ‘black islands’) Includes mainland New Guinea and, excluding Micronesian Nauru, all of the islands south of the equator out to and including Fiji in the east and New Caledonia in the south. Island Melanesia refers to Melanesia without mainland New Guinea. The Indonesian province of Papua covers the western half of New Guinea. The eastern half comprises the mainland provinces of Papua New Guinea, which also includes the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and northern Solomons.

Micronesia (the ‘small islands’) Includes all the islands north of or straddling the equator between Palau and the Marianas in the west and the Marshalls and Kiribati in the east.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) Special DNA passed on only from mothers.

Paddle-impressed Decoration (only sometimes intentional) created on hand-made pottery with a small carved or cord-wrapped paddle used to shape and thin the walls of the pot before firing.

Pleistocene The previous geological epoch, dating from about 2millionyears ago to the end of the last glaciation 10 000-15 000years ago.

Polynesia (the ‘many islands’) Has several components. Triangle Polynesia encompasses the area between Hawai’i, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Rapa Nui/Easter Island, including Tuvalu. It subsumes West Polynesia, formed by Tuvalu, Tonga and Samoa, and East Polynesia, which covers all of the remainder. New Zealand and nearby islands are increasingly

Separated as South Polynesia, as is the case in this article. The ‘Polynesian outliers’ are Polynesian communities in Melanesia and Micronesia resulting from recent westerly back-migration, while the Mystery Islands are those with signs of prehistoric use which were unpopulated when first found by Europeans. proto language Now-extinct language forming the common ancestor of groups of modern languages. radiocarbon (carbon-14, C14) A dating technique measuring the strength of residual radioactivity in certain atoms of carbon affected by cosmic radiation and absorbed by living tissue before decaying at a known rate upon the death of the organism. robusticity Relatively heavy physique.

Sexual dimorphism Size differences between the sexes (among humans, females are usually smaller than males). stratigraphic association Analytical links between objects deposited together in the same sediment or in the same period and thus assumed to be linked in use in the living culture that produced them in the past.

The Bird’s Head The western end of the island of New Guinea, which looks like the head of a large bird, the body of which extends to the east.

Y-chromosome The distinctive male chromosome, shaped roughly like a Y.

The human history of the Pacific was structured by three principal phases of migration. The first occurred in the Late Pleistocene, when modern humans spread from Southeast Asia into Greater Australia and the neighboring Bismarck and Solomon Islands archipelagoes. Greater Australia is the continent known as Sahul, which formed when lowered sea levels joined New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania during the last glaciation. On the other side of the planet, modern humans were beginning to move into Ice Age Europe at about the same time. The initial dispersal into Near Oceania, the region to the end of the main Solomons chain, registered a profound shift in human affairs. People island-hopped across a significant sea barrier from the Old World, which had long been inhabited by hominids, to an entirely naive new world with an anachronistic marsupial fauna where there was no chance that human progenitors had evolved and ‘hominized’ the landscape.

The second major colonization occurred more than 35 000 years later, and saw the settlement of the last unoccupied part of the globe outside Antarctica. From about 3500 BP, pottery-making sailor-farmers also ultimately of Southeast Asian origin produced the ‘Lapita phenomenon’ in the Bismarcks and then continued on to become the first people to occupy

Remote Oceania, that part of the Pacific beyond the main Solomons. Lapita is characterized as a vast ‘community of culture’ which, at least as far east as Fiji, was maintained by long-distance ties through which people, ideas, and goods such as pottery and obsidian moved over great distances.

The final phase of migration was signaled by the appearance of Europeans in Oceania in the sixteenth century AD. We are still in this final phase, in the sense that colonialism and its aftermath have fostered continuing large-scale migration not only to, but also within and from, the Pacific. Until recently these movements received little archaeological attention outside Australia and New Zealand, but historical archaeology is now starting to make strides in many parts of the Pacific. These advances cannot be covered here but some are dealt with elsewhere (see Oceania: Historical Archaeology in Australia). It should also be noted that recent population shifts have substantive archaeological consequences which should also be subsumed as historical, colonial, or contact archaeology. Recent migrations have profound social and political implications for archaeological practice as well, arising as settlers and indigenous peoples work through their differences concerning perceptions of history and access to archaeological evidence (see Ethical Issues and Responsibilities; Native Peoples and Archaeology; Politics of Archaeology; Who Owns the Past?).