| Abstract: |
The Lapita culture, as discussed in a number of contributions to this volume, is an archaeologically defined culture that appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago around 1400 bce. Lapita spread rapidly through the islands of Near Oceania, which had already been occupied for over 40,000 years (Summerhayes et al. 2010b), and into the islands of Remote Oceania where those ‘Lapita peoples’ were the initial colonists (see section map, Figure 17.1, Chapter 17). Within a few hundred years of its initial appearance, the islands of Reef/Santa Cruz, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were all settled by people who transported the components of the Lapita culture, which includes, among other things, the distinctive designs on the intricately decorated, dentate-stamped, red-slipped pottery that is most commonly used to identify Lapita sites (Kirch 2000). The eastwards expansion of the Lapita culture ends on the edge of the Polynesian Triangle. Tonga was settled around 850 bce (Burley et al. 2012) and Samoa probably at about the same time. The colonisation of the rest of the Polynesian Triangle did not occur until at least 1500 years later, with settlement of the Society Islands occurring around ce 1000 at the earliest and the rest of Central East Polynesia over the next 200–300 years (Wilmshurst et al. 2011).
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