Some stories in this volume start with a consideration of those encounters between Pacific peoples that have been usually relegated to “pre-history” (but see Hau`ofa 1992; 2000 for a critique of this division between history and pre-history). We have already distilled some of Tryon’s insights about the deep time of indigenous encounters, as revealed by linguists from the patterns of past and present languages or by archaeologists from traces in the ground. The deep time revealed by archaeological research can sometimes complement but sometimes confound the profundity of genealogical history recounted in the oral traditions of most Oceanic peoples (see Kame`eleihiwa 1992; and Sahlins and Kirch 1992 for Hawai`i; on the interaction between archaeological and oral historical knowledge amongst both Huli of the PNG Highlands and ni-Vanuatu, especially apropos Roi Mata, see Ballard 1995, 2006).

Most stories in this volume go back to the early appearance of European voyagers in Pacific waters. Margaret Jolly returns to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comparing Quirós’, Bougainville’s and Cook’s voyages in Vanuatu; Serge Tcherkézoff looks at some moments in the eighteenth century in the details of Bougainville and La Pérouse’s encounters in Tahiti and Samoa; Isabelle Merle reads Watkin Tench’s narrative of his stay at Port Jackson in 1788; Bronwen Douglas considers d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition of 1791–94, examining his calls in the Admiralty Islands (PNG), Tasmania, Tonga and New Caledonia; Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon deals with “uncertain times” in Tonga, between 1796 and 1826, a period which postdates early encounters but predates missionary influence.

A trio of chapters deals with more recent moments in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, but, given the later arrival of Europeans, these are still early encounters for those regions. Chris Ballard considers the way in which fictional narratives by Trégance and Lawson preceded the physical exploration of PNG, by Moresby, d’Albertis and others from the 1870s. Mark Mosko takes up the story in southern PNG, where the Mekeo and Roro encountered and creatively responded to the violence of d’Albertis’ and Monckton’s exploratory surveys toward the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Pascale Bonnemère and Pierre Lemonnier juxtapose the stories of violent encounter as revealed in both oral histories and early patrol reports, between the 1920s and the 1970s, in Ankave-Anga territory, at the borders of the Eastern Highlands, Morobe and Gulf Provinces. As this period of time is much closer to the present, they were also able to record the memories of living witnesses who discovered for themselves the nature of Europeans.

Bonnemère and Lemonnier’s contribution to this volume is based both on Australian government archives and remembered oral histories. It poignantly poses the question about the relation between different ways of knowing the past, and between the methods respectively privileged by history (reading the archive), and by anthropology (ethnography in the field). Are the chapters which follow only historical research, based on archives and with knowledge derived only from European texts? No, since most of the authors of this volume are also anthropologists, who derive their knowledge from ethnography as much as archives and who have spent many years living with the peoples they write about. Moreover, most authors claim that their ethnographic knowledge of contemporary Oceanic societies has enabled them to gain a better understanding of the situations alluded to in narratives generated by early European “discoverers.”

The possibilities of combining archival evidence with indigenous oral history is, of course, greater when the local witnesses to events are still alive, or they remember stories as told by their parents or grandparents who were such witnesses (as in Bonnemère and Lemonnier’s study of the violence of early encounters with the Ankave-Anga of the PNG Highlands). Still, even when events occurred in a past too distant for the oral testimonies of living witnesses, ethnographic and linguistic knowledge acquired more recently brings a different lens to those events, which helps to recuperate indigenous agency, even if we have to hazard speculations about past motivations and strategies. Thus, most authors aspire to a sort of “ethno-history,” a history which moves dialogically between the archive and the field.