While empires rose and fell in the West including the Sumerians, the Romans, and even the Mongols; oceanographic navigators spread across the Pacific from the Philippines to New Zealand. But the path towards expansion in the Pacific came in stages and developed through a complex culture whose springboard from the Solomon Islands and Fiji would lead towards one of the most incredible chapters in human exploration.
The Lapita culture- named for the type of archaeological site the culture's material remains were first discovered at in New Caledonia- flourished between 3600-2500 years ago in what is today the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. Additionally, archaeologists who specialize in researching the culture divide the Lapita into three distinct sub-cultures based on unique patterns used in their pottery along geographic lines with the Far West Lapita in the Solomon Islands, the West Lapita in New Caledonia and Vanuatu, and the East Lapita in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa.
While many associate the agricultural revolution which saw the mass domestication of plants and animals with the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and parts of China and India, the people of the Lapita culture were also domesticating plants and animals in the South Pacific. Farmers there developed a unique horticulture cultivating taro, yams, coconuts, bananas and varieties of breadfruit and raising animals such as pigs, dogs, and chickens. They also supplemented their diets with seafood including mollusks in a process that produced enough food for a trade economy to develop between islands which would allow for the circulation of goods such as obsidian, shells, and stone farming tools like adzes.
While it is unknown what language the people of the Lapita culture spoke, most linguists believe they spoke an ancestral tongue of today's Polynesian and Melanesian languages known as Proto-Oceanic; and it may have been during this culture's height that much of the early foundations of the mythologies and religions of the Pacific began to develop. What is more well known is the material culture the people of the Lapita left behind. Potters among the culture created low-fired earthenware tempered with shells and sand decorated with unique designs mirrored in designs later found on tapa cloth.
What might be more fascinating however are the remains of the Lapita dead. One burial site discovered on Vanuatu contained thirty-six human skeletons all with their heads removed after burial. Those who buried these dead buried their heads elsewhere and replaced the heads of the dead with cone shells before placing their bodies in burial jars. One grave contained the skeleton of an elderly man with three skulls sitting on his chest while another contained a burial jar decorated with birds looking into the jar.
The people who would become the Lapita culture derive from modern-day Taiwan, leaving the island roughly five to six thousand years ago during what archaeologists and historians refer to. as the Austronesian Expansion- an event that would see peoples from modern-day Taiwen expand across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to become most of the peoples of Oceania and Madagascar today. The ancestors of the Lapita migrated first into the islands of the Philippines, then into parts of Melanesia which was at the time a much larger land mass known as Sahul connecting New Guinea and Australia with a land bridge. Historians argue over whether the ancestors of the Lapita migrated through Sahul- intermingling with the peoples already living there on their way to the Solomon Islands- or if they navigated by sea across the islands of Micronesia and the Mariana Islands.
What is known however thanks to genetic evidence uncovered from Lapita graves in both Vanuatu and Tonga is that the people of the Lapita culture were genetically descended from Northern Philippines and Taiwan and that they share genetic traits with the Chamorro- the indigenous peoples of the Mariana Islands north of Micronesia without genetic traits shared with the peoples of Papua New Guinea. Most archaeologists believe this proves theories that the ancestors of the Lapita moved through Micronesia instead of Sahul on their way from the Philippines to the Solomon Islands and beyond.
It is difficult to say exactly what happened to the Lapita culture when they really weren't a single, unified culture at all. In fact, archaeologists simply organize their identity based on the material evidence they left behind rather than by any unified governmental structure. Like the Bell Beaker culture of Chalcolithic Europe, the Lapita were a group of people spread over a wide ranging area unified by their use of similarly designed and decorated pottery and other artifacts that outlived those who produced them.
Instead, one must instead simply look to the remaining history of the Pacific to understand what would become of the people who made up the Lapita Culture. As with the Lapita, the culture's descendents continued to migrates across the Pacific and develop inter-island trade networks along their way. Languages diversified as people spread into places like the Tahiti roughly 1300 years ago, the Hawaiian Islands roughly 1100 years ago, Easter Island (or Rapa Nui) roughly 1000 years ago, and New Zealand (or Aotearoa) roughly 800 years ago. There is even genetic and linguistic evidence that descendents migrated to modern-day Chile- likely as the result of trade networks connecting Oceanic cultures to the Pacific coast of South America.
It is easy then to understand what became of the Lapita culture; it simply continued on as an idea- a culture founded on the desire to explore beyond the horizon in search of new lands, a desire to create human connection through trade and art, and through a desire to dream of a world beyond that of the living in which the souls of the dead could find new life. The Lapita culture would be the epicenter of where the cultures of the Pacific would diversify to spread to every corner of the ocean from Hawaii to New Zealand and from the Solomon Islands to Chile. Along the way, their descendents would create unique cultures of their own to become a diverse collection of unique identities across the Pacific carrying with them a legacy founded by the people of the Lapita culture.
Comments