Chapter 6. The Lapita Culture and Austronesian Prehistory in Oceania

The most widespread cultural horizon in Oceania is the Lapita culture, defined initially on the basis of its highly distinctive decorated pottery (see Green 1990 for a “potted” history of Lapita studies). Its geographic spread is from Manus (Admiralties) and the Vitiaz Straits (between New Guinea and New Britain) in the west to Tonga and Samoa in the east (Map 1). On New Guinea itself sherds from a single pot only have been found at Aitape on the north coast of West Sepik Province (Papua New Guinea). The Lapita culture dates from about 1600 BC to between 500 BC and the time of Christ in different areas, by which time it had lost its more general but distinctive features (see Spriggs 1990a for a discussion of Lapita distribution and chronology).

When the widespread distribution of Lapita was first recognized in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was linked with the spread of Austronesian (An) languages in the region and on occasion interpreted as representing the migration of speakers of these languages from Island Southeast Asia, through Melanesia and out into the Pacific (Bellwood 1978:255; Pawley and Green 1973; Shutler and Marck 1975). In the 1980s, perhaps inevitably, reaction set in against this simple equation, at least as far as Island Melanesia was concerned. The equation for Fiji and Western Polynesia remains generally uncontroversial. The ANU Lapita Homeland Project was formulated in 1983-84 specifically to examine the possibility of local development of the Lapita culture in the Bismarck Archipelago to the immediate east of New Guinea from indigenous roots (Allen 1984). Perhaps equally inevitably the mass of information on the prehistory of Island Melanesia gained from this project and a number of related projects which followed it have complicated the issues rather than resolved them (Allen and Gosden 1991; Gosden et al. 1989). Two very different views have been championed in recent years. Some researchers espouse an almost entirely indigenous development of Lapita in the Bismarcks (Allen and White 1989; White, Allen and Specht 1988) while others view it as largely but not exclusively an intrusive culture with its major links further west to Island Southeast Asia (Bellwood, this volume; Green 1991a; Kirch 1988a; Spriggs 1991b, in press). As always there is a tribe of more cautious, or perhaps simply more pusillanimous, fence sitters waiting to see who prevails.

The “indigenists” see any argument from language or genetics as being irrelevant to any consideration of the origins of an archaeologically defined entity, an archaeological culture for instance. At one level they are of course right. Much confusion has occurred in the Pacific by the mixing at too early a stage of investigation of concepts and terms between disciplines involved in researching the prehistory of the region. Methodologically the best way to proceed in constructing Pacific prehistory is to keep apart the different data bases of archaeology, linguistics and genetics, and keep apart their arguments for constructing prehistories, as long as possible or at least until the excitement becomes too much.

This is what I will attempt to do for Melanesia and Western Polynesia, constructing in outline an archaeological prehistory, before comparing it with the linguistic prehistory presented elsewhere in this volume by Pawley and Ross and by Dutton (see also Ross 1988, 1989), and the genetic prehistory summarized by Bhatia, Easteal and Kirk and by Serjeantson and Gao (see also Hill and Serjeantson 1989). It is in this final necessary step of comparing the different prehistories that the indigenist viewpoint fails because it refuses to engage in any such comparison. There are clearly implications for prehistory in the distribution of language groups and of genetic markers in the Pacific. Failing to address them is throwing out the baby with the bathwater (cf. Anthony 1990).