Lapita culture
The Lapita intermarried with the Papuan populations to various degrees, and are the direct ancestors of the Austronesian peoples of Polynesia, eastern Micronesia, and Island Melanesia.
[7][8] The Lapita archaeological culture is named after the type site where it was first uncovered in the Foué peninsula on Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia.
More than 200 Lapita sites have since been uncovered,[9] ranging more than 4,000 km from coastal and island Melanesia to Fiji and Tonga with its most eastern limit so far in Samoa.
The term Lapita is now used to refer to the collection of theories regarding the origin and features of the ancestors of the people that speak the Oceanic languages.
Other important parts of the Lapita repertoire were: undecorated ("plain-ware") pottery, including beakers, cooking pots, and bowls; shell artifacts; ground-stone adzes; and flaked-stone tools made of obsidian, chert, or other available kinds of rock.
[4] In 2003, at the Teouma archeological excavation site on Efate Island in Vanuatu, a large cemetery was discovered, including 25 graves containing burial jars and a total of 36 human skeletons.
All the skeletons were headless: At some point after the bodies had originally been buried, the skulls had been removed and replaced with rings made from cone shells, and the heads had been reburied.
[16] Lapita culture villages on islands in the area of Remote Oceania tended not to be located inland, but instead on the beach, or on small offshore islets.
[20] Linguists and other researchers theorize that the people of the Lapita cultural complex spoke Proto-Oceanic, which is a branch of the Austronesian language family widely distributed in Southeast Asia today.
[2]: 18 Matthew Spriggs sees the Lapita as the source of Oceanic Austronesian languages and of cultural and religious concepts in much of the Pacific.
[16][25] In 2011, Peter Bellwood proposed that the initial movement of Malayo-Polynesian speakers into Oceania was from the northern Philippines eastward into the Mariana Islands, then southward into the Bismarcks.
Other evidence suggests that the Luzon area may have been the original homeland of the stamped pottery tradition that is carried forward in Lapita culture.
On the Bismarck Archipelago, around 3,500 years ago, the Lapita complex appears suddenly, as a fully-developed archaeological horizon with associated highly developed technological assemblages.
This suggests that the Lapita culture was brought in by a migrating population, and did not – as had been proposed in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars like Jim Allen and J. Peter White – evolve locally.
[28] The orthodox view, advocated by Roger Green and Peter Bellwood, and accepted by most specialists today, is the so-called "Triple-I model" (short for "intrusion, innovation, and integration").
The complete absence of "Papuan" admixture in these remains suggest that the voyages of the migrants bypassed eastern Indonesia and the rest of New Guinea.
[33] A 2023 study states that Lapita people already have increased Northeast Asian ancestry (~21–29%) compared to ancient groups that initially settled in Taiwan (~0–8%).
In the 1950s, Edward Winslow Gifford, who assisted McKern in 1920, led expeditions that eventually centered on the beach of the Koné Peninsula from where the Lapita term was coined.
Gifford later demonstrated the connection between the evidence from previous discoveries, including Merye's Watom islands sherds and McKern's Bayard Dominick expedition.
Gifford also proved a relationship between his Lapita artifacts and those discovered by Pieter Vincent van Stein Callenfels along the Karama River in Sulawesi.
There is continuity in most aspects of the archaeological record that appears to mimic post Lapita sequences of Fiji and island Melanesia (Mangaasi and Naviti pottery).
