Settlement of the Australia-New Guinea area, then joined as the continent of Sahul, occurred at least 40,000 years ago (White and O’Connell 1982), and there is now thermoluminescence dating evidence for human occupation on the order of 55,000 years ago from northern Australia (Roberts, Jones and Smith 1990). In 1980 the first evidence was obtained for Pleistocene (before 10,000 years ago) occupation of the islands to the east of New Guinea, within the region in Melanesia known as Near Oceania. A date was obtained from a site on New Britain of about 11,400 years ago (Specht, Lilley and Normu 1981). In 1986 dates around 33,000 years old were obtained from New Ireland (Allen et al. 1988; Allen, Gosden and White 1989), and in 1988 came evidence from Buka at the northern end of the Solomons chain for occupation by 29,000 years ago (Wickler and Spriggs 1988). Finally, in 1990 Pleistocene occupation was confirmed for Manus in the Admiralty Islands by research conducted by Wal Ambrose, Spriggs and Clayton Fredericksen.
Initial occupation of New Guinea and the rest of Near Oceania (the Bismarck and Solomon archipelagoes) was by hunting and gathering populations, but possibly by 7000 BC and more certainly by about 4000 BC an indigenous development of agriculture occurred in the New Guinea Highlands, and almost certainly in the lowlands of the island as well. The evidence is from ditching of swamps in the Highlands, significant forest clearance revealed in pollen records (Golson 1977, 1989) and plant macrofossils of several important New Guinea domesticated nut and tree species at the Dongan site in the Sepik-Ramu Basin at 4700 BC (Swadling, Araho and Ivuyo 1991). Equivalent evidence has not been found in the Bismarcks and Solomons, apart from the exploitation of Canarium nut trees apparently introduced from the mainland of New Guinea (Yen 1985:320, 1990:262, 268) before the end of the Pleistocene. It is thus possible that an agricultural focus existed in New Guinea, with the adjacent islands pursuing more of a hunting and gathering economy in the immediately pre-Lapita period. This contentious issue is discussed in more detail elsewhere (Spriggs 1993).
Until recently the evidence for an indigenous development of agriculture in New Guinea seemed to sit, at least to me, rather uneasily with introduced pig remains in the New Guinea Highlands at 4000 BC and more uncertainly at 8000 BC. The pig is not indigenous to Melanesia and would have had to have been brought in from Island Southeast Asia (see Groves, this volume). Recent direct dating by accelerator mass spectrometry of pig remains claimed to be from early contexts now raises the possibility that pigs have only been in the Highlands for a much shorter period (David Harris, pers.comm.), although new claims of pig in a 4000 BC context have recently been made for the north coast of New Guinea (Gorecki, Mabin and Campbell 1991:120).
South and east of the main Solomons chain, however, in the area known as Remote Oceania (see Bellwood Map 1, this volume), there is no clear evidence of human settlement earlier than the Lapita culture, dating in Vanuatu and New Caledonia to about 1200 BC. For this part of Melanesia and for Western Polynesia, Lapita appears to be the founding culture (see Green 1991b and Spriggs 1989b for discussion).
As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Lapita was initially defined on the basis of its highly distinctive pottery, decorated by dentate (toothedstamp) impression. With the possible exception of the Sepik-Ramu pottery (Swadling, Araho and Ivuyo 1991), it is the earliest pottery tradition in Melanesia. Lapita-like decoration is not found in earlier pottery assemblages in Island Southeast Asia (it does occur there slightly later — Spriggs 1989a:607), but the range of vessel forms and the use of red-slip decoration are shared between the two regions.
There are now three sub-styles of Lapita recognized (Anson 1983, 1986), which have geographical and chronological significance (Spriggs 1990b).
- Far Western, or as I would prefer “Early Western”, Lapita is limited to the Bismarck Archipelago and dates from about 1600 to 1200 BC or slightly later. This sub-style has produced the most complex vessel forms and the most elaborate decorative motifs, often executed using extremely fine dentate stamps.
- Western Lapita is found after 1200 BC in the Bismarcks and represents the earliest Lapita pottery in the Solomons, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It consists of less elaborate decoration, fewer vessel forms and generally the use of coarser stamps. This sub-style lasts until about the time of Christ in some areas while in others dentate-stamping as a decorative technique had ceased by 500 BC. An example is given in Figure 1.
- Eastern Lapita is found in Fiji and Western Polynesia starting around 1000 BC. The motifs are simpler still and there are fewer vessel forms. A coarse dentate-stamping is often used. In Tonga the sub-style may have continued in use until about 2000 years ago, whereas in Samoa it appears to have ceased much earlier by about 800 BC. This sub-style is related most closely to the Western style Lapita assemblage of Malo in northern Vanuatu.
The tendency in Lapita pottery is for simplification through time, and as the style spread from west to east. In all areas of its distribution vessel forms and decoration became less elaborate over time. Finally the vessels either become entirely plain or are decorated with incised and/or applied relief designs. These latter decorative techniques are present but rare in earlier Lapita assemblages.
But Lapita is not just pots. There is a whole “package” of material culture items and other distinctive features which like the pottery are not found in earlier cultural assemblages. The existence of this distinctive assemblage is often underplayed by those who argue that Lapita developed in Melanesia with minimal external input. Evidence that Lapita does represent some kind of break with preceding assemblages in Melanesia is evident from the following observations:
- South and east of the main Solomons Lapita is the founding culture, representing the first human occupation of Remote Oceania.
- Everywhere Lapita is found it marks the first appearance in Island Melanesia of the three Oceanic domesticates — the pig, dog and chicken, all derived from Island Southeast Asia, as well as the commensal Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), again of Asian origin.
Figure 1: A dentate-stamped pottery vessel from Malo Island, Vanuatu. The bottom figure is a simplified version of the dentate-stamped composition shown above.
- There is a distinctive Lapita stone adze kit, in part an innovation of the Lapita culture and in part derived from Island Southeast Asian adze forms (Green 1991a).
- There are distinctive Lapita shell ornament types (Kirch 1988b), some of which also occur in Neolithic Island Southeast Asian assemblages.
- A major extension in the range of distribution of Talasea (New Britain) and Lou Island (Admiralties) obsidian occurs with Lapita. Lou Island obsidian is not found outside the Admiralties Group in pre-Lapita times. But it is found in Lapita sites throughout the Bismarcks, Solomons and into Vanuatu. Talasea obsidian was distributed pre-Lapita to the west on the New Guinea mainland as far as the Sepik-Ramu Basin,[1] and to the south and east in New Ireland and on Nissan, an island between New Ireland and the Northern Solomons (Spriggs 1991a). In Lapita times its distribution encompassed Sabah in Borneo (Bellwood and Koon 1989) to the west and Fiji in the east (Best 1987), a spread of some 6500 km.
- Lapita possesses a distinctive settlement pattern of large villages, often consisting of stilt houses over lagoons or on small offshore islands, and certainly always within a kilometre or two of the shore. Lapita sites do not generally re-occupy previously used locations except in rockshelters. The settlement pattern suggests a defensive posture or avoidance of mainland situations where malaria might have been rife.
- There is evidence in the vicinity of Lapita sites for extensive forest clearance and higher than previous erosion rates, suggestive of an agricultural basis to the economy (Gosden et al. 1989:573).
- Lapita also represents the movement out into the Pacific of a wide range of domesticated plants, of either Southeast Asian or New Guinea origin. Macrofossils of these plants are found in many Lapita sites, but in Island Melanesia have not so far been found in earlier archaeological contexts (Gosden et al. 1989:573-574).
The question of the origin of the Lapita crop complex remains unresolved. Island Southeast Asian Neolithic cultures were at least initially rice-using and yet rice was not transferred across to Melanesia. Yen (1982, 1985, 1990) has challenged the earlier assumption that the crop complex carried into the Pacific by the Lapita culture was also of Asian or Southeast Asian origin. The wild progenitors of many of these crops can now be seen as of New Guinea origin, in line with the evidence mentioned previously for an early centre of plant domestication in this area.
Three questions are raised by this. How far in the islands to the west of mainland New Guinea did the process of pre-Lapita domestication extend? Secondly, how much further had the domesticates themselves spread in pre-Lapita times? Thirdly, could some of the plants in question have been domesticated independently in areas of Southeast Asia and in New Guinea? As the area immediately west of New Guinea, and indeed the western half of New Guinea itself, are still little explored archaeologically, no answers to these questions can yet be formulated. To the extent that the Lapita crop complex may have been picked up from the New Guinea region rather than Island Southeast Asia, there is a wide area in which any crop transfer could have occurred — from eastern Indonesia and along the north coast of New Guinea to the Bismarcks. The lack of evidence so far for many of these plants in pre-Lapita contexts in the Bismarcks gives no reason to suggest primacy for that area in any such transfer. It may have occurred earlier and far to the west.
What does Lapita culture represent in the various areas where it occurs? In Remote Oceania including Polynesia it represents initial colonization by human groups, equipped with a fully agricultural economy. In Near Oceania (the Bismarcks and Solomons) it represents the first appearance of domestic animals, a range of new artefact forms including pottery, a shift in settlement patterns, dramatic changes in obsidian exchange networks and the first clear evidence for an agricultural base to the economy.
Because of a dearth of immediately pre-Lapita sites, it is hard to assess continuities in Lapita from pre-Lapita cultures in Near Oceania. Where these do occur some continuities are apparent. Canarium nut exploitation remains an important part of the economy. There is continuity too in some artefact types: Tridacna (clam) shell adzes, Trochus shell armrings, simple shell beads and probably simple one-piece shell fishhooks (Spriggs 1991b). The discontinuities, however, seem more substantial, given the many new artefact types in the Lapita inventory listed previously. In the Talasea area of New Britain comparison is hampered by preservation conditions such that organic materials (including shell) are not preserved. Pre-Lapita and Lapita period obsidian technologies there, however, are extremely different with an earlier elaborate blade industry not continuing into Lapita levels (Torrence, Specht and Fullagar 1990). Apart from the Talasea area, there are few obviously pre-Lapita open sites and many of the previously inhabited rockshelters went out of use between about 6000/4000 BC and the Lapita or immediately post-Lapita period.
On the island of New Guinea itself, Lapita does not represent anything apart from the fragments of a single pot, seemingly of a late Lapita style. There is a comparable but somewhat later phenomenon, however, in the archaeologically instantaneous spread of the Papuan red-slipped pottery style found west to east along the south coast of Papua at about AD 200 (Irwin 1980, 1991). The spread is again associated with a distinctive settlement pattern, long-distance movement of obsidian (this time from Fergusson Island sources in Milne Bay Province, PNG) and other items of material culture ultimately derivable from the Lapita culture of the Bismarcks. This pottery tradition is the earliest along the south coast of the island of New Guinea. Slightly later again after AD 500 pottery appears along the north coast and on islands offshore from Madang Province, related again to the Bismarcks assemblages (Lilley 1988). As already mentioned the status and age of the Sepik-Ramu pottery styles are not yet clear, but they are certainly not in the Lapita style.
I would argue that the dates for pottery in Island Melanesia in relation to Southeast Asia, the rapid spread of Lapita culture, the nature of the new material culture items, the Southeast Asian links for the domestic animals and the pottery vessel forms and red slip, and the distinctive settlement pattern argue for Lapita culture representing a migration into the Bismarcks from areas to the west in Island Southeast Asia. Lapita culture, though intrusive, did not exist isolated from the already existing cultures of the area and there is some carry-over in material culture items and continuing exploitation of the major obsidian sources. There appears to have been a pause of some 400 or so years in the Bismarcks, ample time for significant interaction with local populations, before the culture spread through the Solomons and out into Remote Oceania at about 1200-1000 BC.
When the Lapita design system disappears in Island Melanesia and Fiji between about 500 BC and AD 1, different pottery styles derivable from the non-dentate-stamped “domestic ware” of Lapita appear from Manus to Fiji. Vanuatu obsidian and pottery types appear in Fiji at this time (Best 1984, 1987), evidence of renewed contacts to the west. The changes in pottery style might represent further population movements or alternatively continuity of groups who remained in interaction over the previous range of Lapita in Melanesia as I have argued previously (Spriggs 1984; see also below).
The archaeology of Micronesia is much less understood (see Craib 1983 for summary). The Mariana Islands appear to have been first settled at about 1200-1000 BC (Bonhomme and Craib 1987) and there are some very specific parallels with Island Southeast Asian pottery of the same general period. The rest of Micronesia has so far only produced sequences for the last 2000 years. Plain and rim-notched pottery from Eastern Micronesia could plausibly be derived from late Lapita assemblages (Athens 1980).