At the beginning of the twentieth century on Watom Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, the northern island chain of Papua New Guinea, a German priest was setting up a mission station. Father Otto Meyer noticed that some broken pieces of decorated pottery had been washed out by a tropical thunderstorm. He thought they might be evidence of ancient contact with South America, but he made the disclaimer: 'I, poor hermit, what do I know of these scientific questions, which are so perplexing, even for you, the scientists, by the Grace of God?' The perplexing questions entailed in Father Meyer's pot shards are indeed the big questions of Pacific prehistory and material culture.

When early European sea voyagers sailed into the Pacific they encountered the Polynesians on many tiny islands scattered across an ocean far larger than any continent. How, they asked, could a stone-age people have discovered and colonised such a vast space without scientific knowledge? And where had they come from? The details of how it all took place - one of the world's great stories of migration - are still being uncovered. Father Otto Meyer's pots, their distinctive decorations, and the cultural meaning they suggest, provided the first vital clues.

The pot shards lay forgotten at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris for decades. Then after World War II archaeologists began finding similar ceramics on islands scattered across a vast arc of the southwest Pacific from New Guinea to Tonga and Samoa. They were named 'Lapita' after the local name for a dig in New Caledonia. When carbon dating came in, the earliest sites were dated at about three and a half thousand years before the present.

Lapita pots are earthenware, low-fired at 500-600°C on open fires, as is still done in the Pacific. They largely comprise functional undecorated jars and bowls, apparently for food storage. In addition to these are highly decorated bowls with pedestal feet, flat-bottomed dishes and jars with flaring rims. These decorated pots seem to have been made for presenting food. While the functional pottery was traded or used as containers, the decorated ware must have had prestige value. American scholar Patrick Vinton Kirch believes it was used in ritual exchanges between clans having common ancestors. The designs on the pots with their complex 'grammar' would have had a ritual meaning related to the ancestor spirits.

The decorating technique involved stamping the clay before firing with toothed tools. The clay was sometimes incised and occasionally sculpted. The toothed or 'dentate' impressions were repeated in complex patterns and abstract representations of the human face, eyes, noses, arms, and fingers. Much skill and hard work would have gone into the making. Importantly, throughout the many islands spanning more than 4000 kilometres, the designs conform to a single artistic code. Kirch describes this code as 'the product of a complex grammar of design, in which motifs are built up from sets of design elements through highly specific process rules.'

We do not understand exactly what the Lapita designs are saying, but through analysis of the pottery we can infer much about the people who produced them. It has led to a major breakthrough in our understanding of Pacific prehistory.

Who were the Lapita people? Firstly, digs in Tonga tell us that they were the first discoverers of the Polynesian Pacific, and that there is a single unbroken cultural sequence from their first settlement to modern times. The conclusion must be that the Lapita people were the ancestors of the present Polynesian population. Secondly, dating of the Lapita sites between the Bismarck Archipelago in the west and Tonga and Samoa in the east shows that the Lapita people expanded into the Pacific from west to east. Taken together, this adds weight to the idea that the ancestors of the Polynesians originally came from somewhere on the Asian coast, setting out on colonising voyages from Indonesia about three and a half thousand years ago. This theory is generally accepted nowadays, ably described by Kirch and Peter Bellwood at the ANU.

The Lapita were certainly a maritime people. They brought from Asia a range of agricultural plants and their pigs, dogs and chickens, but they depended largely on fishing. At that time the large islands of New Guinea and the Solomons were already occupied by a different racial group, the darker skinned Melanesians. The Lapita people settled on small off-shore islands, choosing natural harbours protected by fringing coral reefs.

They were a tremendously dynamic, mobile people and their colonising thrust eastward was fast. On average, every generation may have gone on a voyage of discovery of 180 to 300 kilometres, and each new settlement maintained contact with the parent village. Archaeological evidence shows that in the early years of Lapita expansion they exchanged goods over great distances. It is the Lapita pots which offer the best evidence.

Kirch, in The Lapita Peoples,describes his work on the tiny off-shore island of Talepakemalai in the Bismarck Archipelago. Three and a half thousand years ago this was a newly established, thriving Lapita fishing village, sited on the shores of a lagoon and facing an opening in the coral reef. The houses had been built out over the lagoon waters, raised on stilts. In the sand of the lagoon and on the beach, Kirch uncovered a great wealth of archaeological evidence: food and plant remains, shell fish hooks and carpenters' tools, and some of the most beautiful examples of decorated Lapita pottery. Analysis of the clay and sand temper of the pottery revealed that 90% was of non-local origin and had been transported, presumably by canoe, over long distances. Ritual exchange of these decorated pots, honouring or symbolising common ancestors, helped the dispersed Lapita colonies maintain their social networks.

Pots cannot speak, and some researchers dispute the significance of decorated Lapita pots, and even that we should identify the Lapita people as the ancestral culture of the Polynesian Pacific. Their quarrel lies with the impossibility of conclusively identifying a given artefact with a particular language group unless it has some of that language written on it. Given the strength of the evidence that the Lapita pots provide, however, it would be foolish to deny the Pacific peoples an important part of their history.

Lapita society lasted about a thousand years. After the initial burst of colonisation, the need for inter-island trade and ritual exchange diminished, and the tradition of decorating pots declined. In most of Polynesia even the making of pots was abandoned in favour of carved wooden vessels. However, the designs themselves seem to have been preserved to the present in tattooing and in the designs on barkcloth.

Tattooed skin and barkcloth don't last for ever, but the decorations on Lapita pots are virtually indestructible. Were it not for Lapita ware, much of Pacific prehistory would still be terra incognita. We can be grateful for this extraordinary godsend. Ancestor gods may indeed have had a hand in it. Perhaps the Lapita pots' decorations were not just coded messages between related clans on islands scattered across the vast ocean, or between ancestral spirits and descendants. We too are receiving messages from the ancestors.

References

Bellwood, P, Man's Conquest of the Pacific: the Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania, 1978. Collins.

Green, Roger C, 1991. 'A reappraisal of some Lapita sites in the Reef/Santa Cruz Group of the southeast Solomons' in P. Bellwood ed. Indo-Pacific Prehistory Canberra: Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 1990.

Kirch, P.V, 1997. The Lapita Peoples. Blackwell Publishers.