Lapita culture

Learn about the earliest people to migrate into Oceania and the secrets of these people that scientists are starting to unlock.

Waikato Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory Director Associate Professor Fiona Petchey outlines some of what we know about these people named Lapita.

Questions for discussion

• Why do you think researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand are so interested in the people called Lapita?
• Take a closer look at some of the pottery created by Lapita. What patterns can you see? What do these patterns remind you of?

Transcript

Associate Professor Fiona Petchey

The people that we call the Lapita people are a group of people that came through the Pacific around about 2,400 years ago. They were the first people that entered into the remote island Pacific, and they brought with them a range of materials of which a low-fired urbanware pottery is the most distinctive item.

The way we usually recognise Lapita pottery is by this pattern that’s called dentate stamping. What dentate stamping is, you get a shell and you cut little grooves in the edge of it and then you press that into clay and you end up with these pin-points sort off, and that’s what these potters did to decorate their pots is they had some sort of tool, which they impressed into the damp clay and drew all sorts of wonderful designs into the surface of these pots. And it’s almost unique in the Pacific to Lapita. So if you find a dentate-stamped piece of ceramic, you know that you’ve got a site that is between about 2,400 and 2,500 years old.

The Lapita people supposedly developed in the Bismarck Archipelago, but then they spread through Vanuatu and they got as far as Samoa. Samoa is the last place in the Pacific that has suitable clays for making ceramics. So after Samoa, we lose track of them completely. They’re very difficult to track. We assumed they became ancestral Polynesians in culture, but we just don’t know.

There’s a lot of DNA work being done on the very few Lapita-aged burials that have been found. And they are showing different groups of people coming in at different times into the Pacific, and they’re basically indicating that there is multiple different groups coming in at later times and mingling with the existing populations. So I think it’s probably a very standard human story, you know. People moved into an area and then more people move into an area, and they have kids, and more people moved in and so on and so forth.

The C-14 information that I’m picking up suggests that there is some sort of environmental change that will have almost certainly impacted on the people. Whether that’s the only thing that caused this cultural change or caused the Lapita people to disappear, it’s hard to say, it would be just conjecture. But certainly, there are various theories about climate change, the ability of these people to continue to move out into the Pacific as winds changed, as sea levels fell and so on. So there’s a whole range of environmental and social reasons that are all tied up to explain what might have happened. And certainly having a better control on the age of these events and the environmental events that have occurred in the South Pacific will help us understand better exactly what the drive is behind these people moving out or staying put were.

Acknowledgements
Large Lapita burial pot; archaeologist excavating Lapita burial pot; and archaeologists working on burial site, Oceanic Explorations: Lapita and Western Pacific Settlement, Chapter 14 The excavation, conservation and reconstruction of Lapita burial pots from the Teouma site, Efate, Central Vanuatu, Stuart Bedford, Matthew Spriggs, Ralph Regenvanu, Colin Macgregor, Takaronga Kuautonga and Michael Sietz. Terra Australis 26, 2007. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Reconstructed Lapita pot (Port Vila), torbenbrinker, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Ambrose, Wallace. Plaited Textile Expression in Lapita Ceramic Ornamentation. Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence, edited by Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs, ANU Press, 2019. JSTOR. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Lapita pottery sherd in hand and 2 reconstructed sherds (Fiji), Patrick Nunn, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Lapita pottery sherd (Bismark Archipelago) pinned on black, Merryjack, CC BY 2.0.
Lapita pottery sherds with face design, Solomon Islands. Anthropology Photographic Archive, the Department of Anthropology, The University of Auckland.
Wind change maps illustrated by Simon Waterfield from The Long Pause, Connected Level 3. Crown Copyright 2019. These wind direction maps are based on data by Ian D. Goodwin,
Stuart A. Browning, and Atholl J. Anderson, published in the article “Climate windows for Polynesian voyaging”, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2014, 201408918.