Early Lapita colonisation of Remote Oceania: An update on the leapfrog hypothesis (original) (raw)
2009
This paper looks at some problematic aspects of the history of human settlement of the Solomon Islands over the last three millennia. The initial spread of Oceanic languages into Remote Oceania can be strongly associated with the movement into the Reefs/Santa Cruz group and Vanuatu, at about 3200–3100 BP, of bearers of the archaeological culture known as Lapita. Lapita is first attested in the Bismarck archipelago and on geographic grounds one would expect the islands in the main Solomons group (extending from Bougainville to Makira) to have been stepping stones for the Lapita expansion eastwards into Remote Oceania. Thus, archaeologists have been puzzled as to why no early Lapita archaeological sites been found in the main Solomons group, and why almost no pottery-bearing sites of any kind have been found in the southeastern part of the group. Does this mean that the main Solomons group was bypassed in the initial Lapita colonisation of Remote Oceania, as was suggested by Sheppard ...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2001
Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and Island Melanesia-lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. Since the beginning of the series, the basic colour on the spine and cover has distinguished the regional distribution of topics, as follows: ochre for Australia, green for New Guinea, red for Southeast Asia and blue for the Pacific islands. From 2001, issues with a gold spine will include conference proceedings, edited papers, and monographs which in topic or desired format do not fit easily within the original arrangements. All volumes are numbered within the same series.
Ancient Solomon Islands mtDNA: assessing Holocene settlement and the impact of European contact
Archaeologists, linguists and geneticists generally agree that Near Oceania was subject to two major pulses of human dispersal: a Pleistocene occupation around 40,000 BP and a Late-Holocene migration at 3500 BP commonly associated with teh Austronesian expansion out of Taiwan. The latter led to the development of the Lapita cultural complex in the Bismarck Archipelago which resulted in the settlement of Remote Oceania and there are a variety of competing models (express train, slow boat, entangled bank, etc.) used to explain this. Recent genetic studies have focused on this issue, but none of them have taken into consideration the bias possibly introduced by 19th-century historically reported population decline caused by European contact. In this paper we present a case study to test the effect of 19th-20th century colonial impact on the mitochondrial DNA diversity of Solomon Islanders and to investigate the complex stratigraphy of settlement in this archipelago during and after the Lapita period. We extracted DNA from hairs and teeth belonging to 21 individuals collected by the Somerville expedition during the late 19th-century, and typed them for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hypervariable region I (HVS-I) and the intergenic COII/tRNALys 9-base pair deletion (9 bp-del). Comparison of these genetic data with those available from the modern Solomon Islanders and Southeast Asian and Oceanic populations conflicts with the hypothesis of drastic changes in Solomon maternal genepool diversity, indicating that the last century putative bottleneck is not detectable through our genetic data. In addition, the ancient and modern Solomon haplogroup distribution (e.g. M27 haplogroup) suggests, in agreement with some archaeological and linguistic models, that Early Lapita populations expanding out of the Bismarck Archipelago had little or no contact with indigenous non-Austronesian populations in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. This finding indicates smaller scale analyses reveal a more complex reality of genetic admixture in some parts of Oceania than is often assumed in current debates.
The First Millennium B.C. in Remote Oceania: An Alternative Perspective on Lapita
Lilley/Archaeology, 2006
The first millennium BC in Near and Remote Oceania is largely the story of Lapita. There is now a general agreement that Lapita, understood as a culture rather than just the distinctive pottery of the same name, triggered a vast dynamic which in a few centuries saw the discovery and colonisation of most of Melanesia and western Polynesia. In this chapter, I discuss the nature of Lapita in the light of the past 20 years of research and propose an alternative view which integrates the different models and data available today.
Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence
Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence
Lapita has been a focus for archaeologists for generations. Initially inspired by the scattered reporting in the early twentieth century of highly decorated sherds (Meyer 1909; McKern 1929; Piroutet 1917), its increasing significance in terms of the human settlement of the Pacific began to build in the 1960s. The Lapita culture has been most clearly defined by its distinctive dentatestamped decorated pottery and the design system represented on it and on further incised pots. It is defined earliest in the Bismarck Archipelago to the east of the large island of New Guinea, at some time in the centuries preceding 3000 cal. BP. At around that date the Lapita culture spread out from its Bismarck Archipelago 'homeland' to beyond previously inhabited regions of Near Oceania to establish the first human colonies in the western part of Remote Oceania, the present-day southeast Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Wallis and Futuna. At about the same time there was a push to the southwest out from the Bismarcks along the south coast of New Guinea, perhaps even as far as the Torres Straits (McNiven et al. 2006). The broad overlapping themes of this volume, Lapita distribution and chronology, society and subsistence, relate to research questions that have long been debated in relation to Lapita. It is a substantial volume with 23 chapters, reflecting the increasing breadth and focus on different aspects of Lapita that have developed over several decades.
The pattern of Lapita settlement in Fiji
At continental and oceanic geographic scales radiocarbon chronologies are important for calibrating the expansion of prehistoric populations, and understanding the type of dispersal process. In Fiji where the colonisation phasewas relatively brief -within two standard deviations of most Cl4 dates-there are significant differences between Lapita sites and material culture suites. To investigate this variability three models of intra-archipelagic dispersal are reviewed against four categories of archaeological data to examine the pattern of settlement in the scattered Fiji Islands. Initial colonisation was probably restricted to west Fiji and may represent an inter-archipelago hiatus in Lapitaexpansion eastward. East Fiji was settled later during a second phase of systematic colonisation that centered on Lakeba and took in the small noncontinental islands of the Lau Group.