For over forty years, archaeologists working along Papua New Guinea's southern coastline have sought evidence for early ceramics and its relationship with Lapita wares of Island Melanesia. Failing to find any such evidence of pottery more than 2000 BP, and largely based on the excavation of eight early pottery-bearing sites during the late 1960s into the early 1970s, synchronous colonization some 2000 BP along 500km of the south Papuan coastline by post-Lapita ceramic manufacturers has been posited. This paper presents conclusive evidence for the presence of Lapita ceramics along the Papuan south coast between c. 2500 and 2900 cal. BP, thereby indicating that current models of colonization by ceramicists for the region need to be rethought. We conclude with a brief reflection as to why these Lapita horizons were missed by previous researchers.

Beginning approximately cal 1400 BC, Austronesian-speaking Lapita peoples began a colonizing migration across Oceania from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia. The first point of entry into Polynesia occurred on the island of Tongatapu in Tonga with subsequent spread northward to Samoa along a natural sailing corridor. Radiocarbon measurements from recent excavations at 4 sites in the northern Vava'u islands of Tonga provide a chronology for the final stage of this diaspora. These dates indicate that the northern expansion was almost immediate, that a paucity of Lapita sites to the north cannot be explained as a result of lag time in the settlement process, and that decorated Lapita ceramics disappeared rapidly after first landfalls.

No abstract

Ancestral Polynesian society is the formative base for development of the Polynesian cultural template and proto-Polynesian linguistic stage. Emerging in western Polynesia ca 2700 cal BP, it is correlated in the archaeological record of Tonga with the Polynesian Plainware ceramic phase presently thought to be of approximately 800 years duration or longer. Here we re-establish the upper boundary for this phase to no more than 2350 cal BP employing a suite of 44 new and existing radiocarbon dates from 13 Polynesian Plainware site occupations across the extent of Tonga. The implications of this boundary, the abruptness of ceramic loss, and the shortening of duration to 350 years have substantive implications for archaeological interpretations in the ancestral Polynesian homeland.

Patrick V. Kirch and Roger C. Green proposed that Polynesian cultures today emerged and developed in an ancestral homeland situated in western Polynesia, primarily Tonga and Sāmoa. The archaeological marker for the beginnings of cultural and linguistic divergence from a founding Eastern Lapita base is Polynesian Plainware pottery produced for nearly 1,100 years during the Polynesian Plainware phase. Kirch and Green believe this transition reflects social and economic changes that led to the development of an ancestral Polynesian society. An ongoing debate in Pacific anthropology is whether archaeologists can convincingly identify and explain the historical trajectory of an ancestral Polynesian society. My dissertation evaluates the development of an ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga by identifying three processes that shaped its trajectory: isolation, integration, and adaptation. By focusing largely on undecorated ceramics from several Tongan sites, comparisons can be made within Tonga and across the archipelagos of western Polynesia that have implications for understanding unique island histories. If Polynesian culture developed in western Polynesia then the evidence for social and economic change may potentially be reflected in an adequate assessment of the archaeological record from the end of the Lapita phase into the Polynesian Plainware phase. That includes not only ceramic data but non-ceramic data such as site distribution, settlement patterns, subsistence practices, demographic studies, and geochemical source dataall of which provide a more holistic view of early Polynesian culture in Tonga and aid considerably in how we as anthropologists perceive past Polynesian lifeways and development through time.