Peopling of the Pacific

AN39CH09-Kirch ARI 12 August 2010 16:55 Peopling of the Pacific: A Holistic Anthropological Perspective Patrick V. Kirch Departments of Anthropology and Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010. 39:131–48 Key Words First published online as a Review in Advance on Near Oceania, Remote Oceania, cultural phylogeny, historical June 14, 2010 anthropology, voyaging The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at anthro.annualreviews.org Abstract This article’s doi: The human colonization of the Pacific is an enduring problem in histori- 10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104936 cal anthropology. Recent advances in archaeology, historical linguistics, Access provided by Brown University on 01/31/16. For personal use only. Copyright c 2010 by Annual Reviews. and bioanthropology have coalesced to form a set of models for popula- All rights reserved Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010.39:131-148. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org tion movements and interactions in Oceania, which have been tested on 0084-6570/10/1021-0131$20.00 independent data sets. Earliest human movements into Near Oceania began about 40,000 years ago, resulting in great cultural, linguistic, and genetic diversity in this region. About 4000 years ago, the expansion of Austronesian speakers out of Southeast Asia led to the emergence of the Lapita cultural complex in Near Oceania. The Lapita expansion into Remote Oceania, commencing about 1200 BC, led ultimately to the settlement of the vast eastern Pacific, ending with the colonization of New Zealand about AD 1250. Polynesians probably reached the coast of South America, returning with the sweet potato and possibly the bot- tle gourd. Polynesian influences on New World cultures remain a topic of debate. 131 AN39CH09-Kirch ARI 12 August 2010 16:55 In these Proes or Pahee’s as the[y] call them... 1980s. At the same time, a small but ener- these people sail in those seas from Island to Island getic group of linguists tackled the historical for several hundred Leagues, the Sun serving them relationships among the 2000 or more lan- for a compass by day and the Moon and Stars by guages spoken throughout the Pacific. This night. When this comes to be prov’d we Shall be launched a productive and continuing engage- no longer at a loss to know how the Islands lying in ment between linguists and prehistorians, who those Seas came to be people’d, for... it cannot be recognized the potential of testing each other’s doubted but that the inhabitants of those western models against independent data (Green 1999). Islands may have been at others as far to westward And, as the old physical anthropology was of them and so we may trace them from Island to transformed into a modern bioanthropology, Island quite to the East Indias. the unparalleled human biological diversity of James Cook, 1769 (In Beaglehole 1955, p. 154) the Pacific proved fertile ground for testing new methods of population genetics (Hill & In the late eighteenth century, James Cook and Serjeantson 1989, Friedlaender 2007). other European voyagers of the Enlightenment The past 30 years, especially, have seen puzzled at how even the most remote of Pacific an explosion of new archaeological, linguistic, islands had been discovered and peopled by in- and bioanthropological data and interpretation digenous populations, spawning varied theories bearing on the long-standing questions of when and a sizeable literature (Howard 1967). A cen- and how people entered the Pacific and man- tury later, scholars such as Fornander (1878) aged to discover and colonize virtually every synthesized Polynesian oral traditions into one of its thousands of islands. The founders of historical accounts of dubious veracity, tracing four-field anthropology, such as Sapir (1916), Polynesians back to mythical homelands in envisioned the power that a holistic approach South Asia. The advent of modern anthro- could bring to historical questions, but they pology in the early twentieth century led to a lacked the tools to fully implement it. In the re-engagement with the “problem of Polyne- Pacific, this potential has now been realized sian origins” (Kirch 2000, pp. 20–27). However, through the interdisciplinary collaboration of with the methods of archaeology and physical archaeology, historical linguistics, and bioan- anthropology still underdeveloped, compara- thropology. To be sure, not all of the questions tive ethnology dominated. The results ranged have been answered, but immense forward mo- from Handy’s (1930) Kulturkriese diffusionism mentum has been gained, as this essay seeks to to Rivers’s (1914) division of Oceanic peoples demonstrate. into the “Kava” and the “Betel people.” Buck’s (1938) sweeping synthesis, forged in a mid- Access provided by Brown University on 01/31/16. For personal use only. twentieth century cauldron of racial prejudice, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010.39:131-148. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org invoked flawed essentialist notions of human ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE biological types to trace “Caucasoid” Polyne- Archaeology sian migrations around the fringe of “Negroid” Melanesia (see Kirch 2000, pp. 24–27). By 1980, three major conclusions could be ad- As stratigraphic archaeology commenced in vanced based on accumulating evidence from the Pacific following World War II, the eth- archaeological excavations, accompanied by an nologists lost interest in historical questions, increasingly robust radiocarbon chronology: and the search to trace the origins of Oceanic (a) Polynesia was the last part of the Pacific to peoples shifted increasingly to anthropology’s have been settled, and the immediate home- other subdisciplines. Archaeological fieldwork land of the Polynesians was in the Tonga- began in earnest in Polynesia in the 1950s Samoa region; (b) a distinctive ceramic series and 1960s, and began to make major strides named Lapita linked the earliest sites in Tonga in Melanesia and Micronesia in the 1970s and and Samoa with sites scattered throughout 132 Kirch AN39CH09-Kirch ARI 12 August 2010 16:55 island Melanesia, thus bridging the classic innovation, and integration (Green 1991, Kirch ethnographic divide between Melanesia and 1997). Polynesia; and (c)thelargeislandofNew A fundamental conceptual revision to come Guinea had the greatest time depth, with out of the LHP and subsequent research is the demonstrated Pleistocene settlement (Golson abandonment of the nineteenth century, racist 1972). However, significant debate ensued division of Oceania into Melanesia, Micronesia, about whether Lapita represented a population and Polynesia (proposed by the French explorer intrusion into Melanesia from Southeast Asia, Dumont D’Urville in 1832) and its replacement or whether it was an indigenous development with the categories of Near Oceania and Remote in the New Guinea-Bismarck Archipelago re- Oceania (Green 1991). Near Oceania incorpo- gion (Allen 1984). This debate has at times rates New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, been caricatured as competing “fast train and the Solomon Islands as far as San Cristobal to Polynesia” versus “tangled bank” models and Santa Anna, whereas Remote Oceania (Terrell 1986, Diamond 1988, Oppenheimer includes the rest of the Pacific proper. These 2004). In part, the debate revolves around the new divisions are based on the archaeological question of whether phylogenetic signals of hu- demonstration that Near Oceania has a signifi- man history (i.e., homologous changes) are de- cantly greater time depth of human settlement, tectable in linguistic and genetic patterns of extending back into the Pleistocene, whereas variation in the Pacific, or whether intergroup human incursions into Remote Oceania did contact and reticulation has been so pervasive not begin until around 4000 BP (in western as to have erased such phylogenetic history Micronesia) and were not completed until (Bellwood 1996, Terrell et al. 1997, Kirch & as recently as 1000 BP. The old tripartite Green 2001, Greenhill & Gray 2005). categories still find use as geographical short- The multi-institutional Lapita Homeland hand terms, and Polynesia has proven to be a Project (LHP), launched in 1984, sought to meaningful culture-historical category, as all address this debate within the ambit of the Polynesian populations and languages prove to Bismarck Archipelago. The project’s several be descendants of a common clade (Kirch & field teams acquired invaluable new data on Green 2001). But Melanesia has no explanatory Lapita sites (Gosden et al. 1989), but also value other than as a geographic space; to speak demonstrated that human populations had of Melanesian peoples implies nothing about moved into the large islands of New Britain and common origins or relationships in any genetic New Ireland in the Pleistocene, by about 36,000 sense. BP (Wickler & Spriggs 1988, Allen & Gosden 1991, Smith & Sharp 1993). Building on the im- Access provided by Brown University on 01/31/16. For personal use only. petus of the LHP, archaeological excavations in Historical Linguistics Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010.39:131-148. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org both pre-Lapita and Lapita sites throughout is- The integrity of a widespread Austronesian land Melanesia have continued unabated over language family (sometimes referred to in older the past three decades (Kirch 1997, Galipaud literature as Malayo-Polynesian), including & Lilley 1999, Clark et al. 2001, Summerhayes approximately 1200 modern languages spread 2007, Sheppard

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