Posted by Teine Samoa {152.163.189.233} on November 25, 2002 at 00:42:06:
"Truth will not be ignored. It will rise up and consume us."
Ia manuia le aso!
Soifua,
Teine Samoa:)
***********************
How Polynesia was peopled
More secrets are discovered about one of the biggest diasporas before European expansion
John Wilford
NEW YORK TIMES
CANADIAN archaeologist David Burley looked out on Fanga 'Uta Lagoon and tried to think like ancient seafarers. Here, at the head of the lagoon, is where the first of their outrigger canoes must have pulled in, concluding heroic voyages - perhaps more than 1,500 kilometres from the west. So here, on the South Pacific island of Tongatapu in the kingdom of Tonga, he decided to dig.
Although the site had been excavated before, Burley made a revealing discovery concerning a fiercely debated issue in archaeology: the origin and migration routes of the Polynesians.
What he found were shards of the distinctively decorated pottery of the Lapita people, cultural ancestors to modern Polynesians. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal among the shards showed that adventurous seafarers had reached the Tonga islands between 850 and 900 BC, making this the earliest known settlement in Polynesia.
Tongatapu probably served as the staging point for population expansion to other islands of Tonga and into Samoa, concluded Burley, of B.C.'s Simon Fraser University. The place seemed to be what anthropologists and geneticists call a founding colony.
These people, Burley says, must have "formed the gene pool for all the rest of Polynesia."
From this new frontier, scholars think, the ancient navigators perfected the double-hull outrigger sailing canoe and set out on their final expansion, venturing over even more immense stretches of open sea. Each of their bigger canoes probably carried scores of people with their pigs and cargo.
The seafarers made it east to Tahiti (2,300 kilometres) and all the way northeast to Hawaii (more than 4,000 kilometres).
Then, they ranged south to New Zealand and even farther east to Easter Island. The whole of Polynesia, extending over almost one-fourth of the Pacific, thus became the last large area of the world to be settled by people.
The pottery by the lagoon was of particular interest, holding clues to where the seafarers who reached Tongatapu had originated.
In an analysis of bits of the shards, William Dickinson, a University of Arizona geologist, found sandy minerals exotic to Tonga. Some of the pots had been brought there from elsewhere. Further study revealed that the artefacts were composed of minerals found only on the Santa Cruz Islands in Melanesia, nearly 2,000 kilometres to the west and closer to New Guinea and Australia.
In a recent report in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, Burley and Dickinson call the shards the first physical evidence linking the voyages of the Lapita people between the western and eastern regions of the wide Pacific. The researchers speculate that Tonga was initially settled by voyagers travelling directly from central Melanesia, rather than through intermediate settlements in Fiji, as is commonly assumed.
But these findings leave many of the fundamental questions of Polynesian origins - the so-called "Polynesian problem" - unresolved, say other scholars of Pacific history. Who were the people that produced the Lapita pottery as well as distinctive stone tools, beads, rings and shell ornaments? Were they an ethnically distinct society of newcomers or one with diverse groups sharing a handicraft style? What was the relationship of the Lapita culture to descendants of the first settlers of the Pacific, beginning some 45,000 years ago, who occupied Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands?
"We really don't have a good common-sense picture or story of what the migrations were really like," says Dr. John Edward Terrell, an anthropologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
The first of the ornate pots with geometric designs was excavated in 1952 and called Lapita after the discovery site in the Melanesian island of New Caledonia. Subsequent exploration uncovered the earliest known Lapita artefacts, some 3,500 years old, in the Bismarck Archipelago, northeast of New Guinea.
The trail of shards leads from there east to Polynesia. But did the art of making Lapita pottery originate with the indigenous Melanesian population there, or was it introduced by new arrivals?
Early European explorers seem to have been the first to speculate about the identity of the Pacific islanders. In the 18th century, Capt. James Cook was struck by the resemblance of the customs and appearance among the light-skinned Polynesians on islands several thousand kilometres apart. He thought they had originally come from Malaysia or Micronesia. French navigators were sure they could not be related to the dark-skinned Melanesians in the vicinity of New Guinea.
The classification of three general groups of Pacific islanders - Polynesians ("many islands"), Melanesians ("dark islands") and Micronesians ("`little islands") - was a European invention. Some of the differences, it now seems, may be only skin deep.
Until recently, several archaeologists and linguists believed that ancestors of the Polynesians left Taiwan and mainland China 3,600 to 6,000 years ago. They spread through the Pacific relatively swiftly, largely bypassing Melanesia, which would explain why the Polynesians don't have dark skin but speak an Austronesian language, rooted in Taiwan, instead of a Papuan language in parts of Melanesia.
This view, known as the express-train model, soon ran into trouble. Nothing resembling prototypes of the Lapita pottery has been found in Taiwan or southern China. They first show up in the Melanesian Bismarcks. Although early genetic studies seemed to support the model, more recent ones reveal that the ancestors must have stopped off in Melanesia for considerable interbreeding, which has left clear genetic markers in today's Polynesians.
Mark Stoneking, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says the express-train model in its simplest form failed the genetic test, and the debate shifted focus to where the intermarriage took place and how extensive it was.
Dr. Patrick Kirch, director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, says many archaeologists now subscribe to the "triple-I" model - for intrusion, innovation and integration - which recognizes there was some fusion between the newcomers and the Melanesians. Out of this interaction apparently emerged the Lapita pottery style, among other things. Archaeologists are not sure if the pottery was first developed in the Bismarcks, or if it was introduced there by the seafarers from the west.
In an article last year in Current Anthropology, Terrell and colleagues Kevin Kelly of the University of Iowa and Paul Rainbird of the University of Wales wrote that research had yet to account for the differences in appearance between Polynesians and Melanesians noted by the European explorers. So, their article said, there is no way of knowing how diverse other people in the Pacific were when the ancestors of the Polynesians set sail.
The article contended that an important reason Polynesians did not resemble their presumed Melanesian cousins or any Asian forebears was that, in a sense, the Polynesians did not "come from" anywhere.
They became Polynesians after their ancestors settled in the Fiji Islands, Tonga and Samoa. That is, they passed through what is known as a genetic founder event, in which everyone is a direct ancestor of an extremely small number of forebears - perhaps a few canoe-loads of people who landed at Fanga 'Uta Lagoon.
Whatever their roots, the people whose pottery served as signposts of their eastward migrations eventually abandoned the elaborate Lapita style. After their arrival in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, the decorative ceramics disappear in a century or more in favour of plain, functional bowls, cups and storage vessels. The people apparently carried no Lapita pottery on their later voyages to the rest of Polynesia.
"The decorated pottery was probably connected with ritual, belief, religion," Terrell says. "When it got to Tonga, the ideas or politics behind the style became irrelevant. People no longer bothered to produce it and found some other way of expressing their relations to the universe."
By about 2,000 years ago, Kirch says, people in the Tonga area had developed a new technology: the double-hull sailing canoe.
Even though they could not see other islands on the distant horizon, as had their ancestors in the southwestern Pacific, the notion that the ocean was full of islands endured in tradition.
So now that they could, they set forth.
These were not all accidental voyages, as once was thought. The sailors were tacking against the prevailing east-to-west winds, knowing they could ride a following wind back home if necessary.
The "Polynesian problem" may not be solved, but it is attracting increased attention from archaeologists, linguists and geneticists as well as other scholars.
As Kirch says, the peopling of the Pacific was "a huge diaspora, one of the biggest that happened before European expansion" in the 16th century.
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