behaviour within the plow zone. journal of Field Archaeology II:356-63. GAFFNEY, V., AND M. TINGLE. I985. "The Maddle Farm (Berks.) Project and micro-regional analysis," in Archaeological field survey in Britain and abroad. Edited by S. Macready and F. H. Thompson, pp. 67-73. London: Society of Antiquaries. GALLANT, T. W. I986. "Background noise" and site definition: A contribution to survey methodology. Journal of Field Archaeology I3:403-I8.

The Lapita questionThe prehistory of the western Pacific has, for the last 30 years, been dominated by the problem of the origins of the present Polynesian and Melanesian cultures (Terrell 1988). In 1961 Golson drew attention to the distribution of highly decorated Lapita pottery, now known to date from between 3500 BP and 2000 BP, which crossed the present-day division between Melanesia and Polynesia. Furthermore, sites with Lapita pottery represented the first evidence of occupation on Tonga and Samoa, the most westerly Polynesian islands from which it was thought that the rest of Polynesia was colonized. Lapita pottery came to be associated with a movement of people from Melanesia to Polynesia and was seen to represent the founding group ancestral to later Polynesian groups.

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Archaeologists in settler societies need to find theoretically well-founded ways of understanding the sociopolitical milieux in which they work if they are to deal sensibly and sensitively with the colonizers as well as the colonized in their communities. This article explores one avenue that the author has found helpful in a number of contexts. He advances the proposition that, with certain qualifications, the social conditions of settler nations might usefully be approached as the products of a single social condition - diaspora - in a manifestation that is unique to such societies because it positions indigenous peoples as well as settlers as diasporic.