For the earliest stages of Austronesian expansion in Island Southeast Asia the archaeological record relevant to social hierarchy is too sparse to merit consideration. However, as I have indicated above, I am willing to accept from the linguistic evidence that genealogically-based ranking, presumably of individuals within descent groups and also of the descent groups themselves within the larger confines of their societies, was present in Austronesian western Oceania by 3500 years ago.^[4]

But were Austronesian societies ranked in this way long before the settlement of Oceania, or did hierarchy develop during the actual process of geographical expansion from older non-hereditary forms of leadership? How are we to interpret the evidence that non-hereditary leadership evolved in parts of western Melanesia, contrary to certain modern evolutionary beliefs, out of former hereditary chiefdoms (Pawley 1981)? And where do the Papuan-speakers, descendants of the original settlers of western Melanesia and always the dominant population in New Guinea, fit into the overall trajectory? The Papuan-speakers, after all, are excellent exponents of the view that leadership can be splendid and highly visible and yet have no hereditary component whatsoever.

These are complex and important questions. In order to answer them it is necessary to examine the question of non-hereditary leadership in western Melanesia, particularly the institution of the “big man”, a type of leadership currently being intensively examined by many anthropologists in New Guinea and adjacent islands. As many have asked (Schwartz 1963; Friedman 1982:183; Hayden 1983), if big men (or their “great man” counterparts in the sense of Godelier (1986)^[5] ) represent the forebears of hereditary chiefs, then why have they not developed into the latter amongst the densely populated, highly competitive and often strongly inegalitarian Papuan-speaking societies of the New Guinea Highlands? This line of questioning suggests that big men and hereditary chiefs are the results of quite different evolutionary trajectories, rather than successive stages of a hypothetical trend towards fully fledged hereditary aristocracy. In addition, the important question arises of why, if ancestral Proto-Oceanic leaders were hereditary chiefs, so many western Melanesian Austronesian societies should have non-hereditary forms of leadership today.

One answer to this latter question, associated with the writings of Friedman (1981, 1982) and Pawley (1981), is that the relatively egalitarian social systems of Austronesian western Melanesia owe their existence to a kind of “devolution”, a process which Friedman explains as due to an increasing density of trade networks over time giving fewer opportunities for chiefly prestige-good monopoly. His basic view, without the emphasis on trade, is paralleled by that of Liep (1991), who suggests that an original type of hierarchical society introduced by Austronesian settlers into the Massim region of western Melanesia has been deconstituted there into a series of small-scale big or great man systems. Some of these systems have continuing hereditary components in the transmission of ritual skills but they lack a distinctive chiefly stratum, except in the Trobriands where aspects of the earlier hierarchical format survive.

Neither Friedman nor Liep give reasons for this deconstitution of former hierarchy in western Melanesia, and increasing trade density is surely an epiphenomenon reflecting other more fundamental socio-economic changes. The question remains why such deconstitution should have occurred so widely in western Melanesia when it appears to be relatively uncommon on this scale elsewhere in Austronesia. The answer may lie with the prior Papuan-speaking settlers of the region.

Basically, there appears to be a major, deep-seated and probably crucial distinction between the Papuan and the Austronesian societies of Melanesia when they are taken as wholes (ignoring the occasional cases of indeterminacy due to intensive historical contact). The big or great man Papuan systems seem to lack totally any concept of genealogically-based ranking, whether of persons or descent groups, whereas those of the Austronesian-speaking groups often do retain some degree of hereditary transmission of ritual statuses and even a ranking of descent groups by genealogical criteria such as the birth-order of founders. It is my suspicion that a great deal of the deconstitution of chieftainship postulated for Melanesia may be due to the results of strong influence and even cultural take-over by Papuan-speakers of Austronesian social networks (as also suggested by Pawley 1982:46-47), but this process has generally not entirely effaced the prior traces of hereditary rank order amongst the latter.

Although my forays into the literature on the anthropology of Papuan-speaking societies have been rather restricted, I cannot help but notice everywhere the almost total lack of commitment to principles of ascribed ranking. True, some authors have claimed an incipient presence (e.g. Harrison (1987) for the Sepik River Manambu, and Golson (1982) for the Hagen area immediately prior to European contact), but in no case does the ascription seem to have developed a permanent historical existence, unlike the situation amongst many Austronesian-speaking groups in Melanesia. The general lack of concern amongst Papuan-speaking societies with descent and ascription of rank, whether of individuals or clans, and their focus on synchronic affinal and residence ties rather than the diachronic threads of birth and consanguinity, have been clearly expressed by many authors who have explicitly discussed Papuan-speaking societies rather than Melanesians in general (e.g. Brown 1978:186-187; Foley 1986). As Brown states of the Chimbu:

Chimbu concern for the present is indicated in the patterns of social relations and the absence of genealogical recall. Ties are more common with affines than with kin, and adopted members are not distinguished from birth members of groups … There are no ever-enduring clan and tribe ties … Tribes are made up of local alliances, and migrating groups form new alliances (Brown 1972:7).

An even more explicit statement that incorporates some comparative historical reconstruction for New Guinea/Papuan-speaking groups is that of Rubel and Rosman (1978:320-323), although these authors never in fact refer to the linguistic backgrounds of their sample of societies. Their “prototypical structure” for a New Guinea society includes patrilineal descent with a tendency towards virilocal postmarital residence, politically autonomous residential units, formal inter-group exchange patterns involving women and ceremonial feasts, political leadership of the big man type, ritual separation of men and women, and a high significance for male initiation ceremonies. Although this reconstruction is somewhat timeless and placeless, it does hint at the kind of social landscape that might have confronted the initial Austronesian settlers of Melanesia. Taken as a whole, the archaeological and comparative anthropological evidence indicates that some Papuan-speaking societies had evolved dense population networks based on intensive agriculture (Golson 1981) or increasingly efficient forms of exchange, long before the arrival in the region of Austronesian-speakers. In doing so they maintained their ancestral forms of society that allowed the inevitable pressures for inequality to be channelled into non-heritable patterns of leadership and domination. Large and dense populations in this region, contrary to certain cultural-materialist perspectives, did not produce hereditary chiefs.

But why does the Papuan influence on Austronesian societies in western Melanesia seem to have been so pervasive? It seems quite likely that many of the Austronesian peoples of western Melanesia, in terms of genetic research (see Stoneking et al. (1990) and the various discussions in Hill and Serjeantson (1989)), reflect a very high degree of biological input from non-Asian, indigenous Melanesian sources. This input might have been due to continuous intermarriage or even conquest; the finer social details will probably always escape us. The overall result, however, was that some groups of essentially non-Austronesian (presumably ancestral Papuan) linguistic stock transferred their linguistic affiliations to the homogeneous and widely-understood Oceanic Austronesian languages which were being spread rapidly through Melanesia by Lapita colonization around 1500 BC (Bellwood 1989; Pawley 1981; Pawley and Green 1984). As Ross (1988, 1989) has recently noted, the western Melanesian Oceanic languages, which extend from New Guinea to as far east as the southeastern Solomons, show evidence for major interaction with Papuan languages. Furthermore, the Meso-Melanesian languages of the Bismarcks and Solomons, which reveal especially strong traces of such Papuan interaction, have apparently expanded through an area previously occupied (during Lapita times?) by speakers of Central/Eastern Oceanic languages.

From the viewpoint of the coastal Papuan-speakers of the period of Lapita expansion, what better way perhaps to gain some of the advantages of access to a widespread trade network than to learn a language (such as Proto-Oceanic or one of its immediate descendants such as Proto-Central/Eastern Oceanic) which might have been spoken, with only dialectal differentiation, by hundreds of communities spread over thousands of square kilometres of Melanesia — an ethnolinguistic situation that is almost impossible to imagine from the state of diversity in the same region today? Of course, two-way contact between many geographically-contiguous Papuan and Austronesian groups has undoubtedly characterized western Melanesian prehistory continuously during the past 3000 years. But I suspect that a very strong burst of interaction, more Papuan to Austronesian in terms of gene flow but perhaps reversed in terms of language and voyaging technology, occurred right at the start of the Austronesian colonization period.

Having presented a historical stance on the issue of non-hereditary ranking in Austronesian-speaking Melanesia, one that sees the big or great man as in part a transfer from Papuan ideology, I can now return to the issue of ascribed ranking in early Austronesian societies. Were hereditary chiefs a part of the Austronesian social landscape before Proto-Oceanic times, or did they develop purely as an effect of the process of island to island colonization? Are the nonhereditary Austronesian leaders of western Melanesia purely a product of “Papuanization”, or are there other ingredients derived from the Austronesian expansion process itself?