In 1955 the young archaeologist Jack Golson took up the first archaeological post at the University of Auckland, and almost immediately turned his attention to excavating sites in Tonga, Samoa, and New Caledonia. He added new locations to the growing list of sites with dentate stamped pottery, but little was made of these sites until he moved to the Australian National University in 1961. Golson proposed ‘‘some early community of culture linking New Caledonia, Tonga, and Samoa, antedating the ‘Melanesian’ cultures of the first and ancestral to the historic Western Polynesian cultures of the other two. This community is expressed in terms of variants of the same pottery tradition’’. From Canberra, he sent out graduate students to excavate sites across the same region: Jim Specht re-excavated Meyer’s site at Watom, Jens Poulsen worked on Tongatapu, and Colin Smart excavated in New Caledonia. About the same time, Lawrence and Helen Birks were excavating at Sigatoka in Fiji, and Roger Green (1968) was working in Western Samoa. But it was Golson, who began to synthesize these scattered early field reports into a single interpretation of their significance for Pacific prehistory, suggesting that Lapita-style pottery was a key element of what he believed was a prehistoric ‘cultural complex’, a ‘community of culture’ that he understood to extend from New Britain and the Bismarck Archipelago, through New Caledonia and Fiji, to Tonga and Samoa.
The feature of Lapita pottery that has excited Pacific archaeologists ever since has been its wide distribution from New Guinea and the Melanesian Islands into western Polynesia, especially Tonga and Samoa. As an ornate type of decorated pottery with wide distribution across more than 4000 km of the southwest Pacific, Lapita has appeared to many as the key to the peopling of what archaeologist Roger Green dubbed ‘remote Oceania’ (southern Melanesia and all of Polynesia) from ‘near Oceania’, presumably from the Bismarck Archipelago. Archaeological interest in Lapita, thus, began as a way of understanding the peopling of Polynesia rather than as an effort to understand the broad sweep of Melanesian prehistory, which by the 1970s was already known to reach back as far as 25 000 BP in the open site of Kosipe in the Papuan Highlands on the island of New Guinea.
World History
