Pieces of the Vanuatu Puzzle: Archaeology of the North, South and Centre
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terra australis 23 Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia — lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. Since the beginning of the series, the basic colour on the spine and cover has distinguished the regional distribution of topics as follows: ochre for Australia, green for New Guinea, red for South-East Asia and blue for the Pacific Islands. From 2001, issues with a gold spine will include conference proceedings, edited papers and monographs which in topic or desired format do not fit easily within the original arrangements. All volumes are numbered within the same series. List of volumes in Terra Australis Volume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: coastal sites in southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: archaeological excavations in the eastern central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3: New Guinea Stone Age Trade: the geography and ecology of traffic in the interior. I. Hughes (1977) Volume 4: Recent Prehistory in Southeast Papua. B. Egloff (1979) Volume 5: The Great Kartan Mystery. R. Lampert (1981) Volume 6: Early Man in North Queensland: art and archaeology in the Laura area. A. Rosenfeld, D. Horton and J. Winter (1981) Volume 7: The Alligator Rivers: prehistory and ecology in western Arnhem Land. C. Schrire (1982) Volume 8: Hunter Hill, Hunter Island: archaeological investigations of a prehistoric Tasmanian site. S. Bowdler (1984) Volume 9: Coastal South-west Tasmania: the prehistory of Louisa Bay and Maatsuyker Island. R. Vanderwal and D. Horton (1984) Volume 10: The Emergence of Mailu. G. Irwin (1985) Volume 11: Archaeology in Eastern Timor, 1966–67. I. Glover (1986) Volume 12: Early Tongan Prehistory: the Lapita period on Tongatapu and its relationships. J. Poulsen (1987) Volume 13: Coobool Creek. P. Brown (1989) Volume 14: 30,000 Years of Aboriginal Occupation: Kimberley, North-west Australia. S. O’Connor (1999) Volume 15: Lapita Interaction. G. Summerhayes (2000) Volume 16: The Prehistory of Buka: a stepping stone island in the northern Solomons. S. Wickler (2001) Volume 17: The Archaeology of Lapita Dispersal in Oceania. G.R. Clark, A.J. Anderson and T. Vunidilo (2001) Volume 18: An Archaeology of West Polynesian prehistory. A. Smith (2002) Volume 19: Phytolith and starch research in the Australian-Pacific-Asian regions: the state of the art. D. Hart and L. Wallis (2003) Volume 20: The Sea People: late-Holocene maritime specialisation in the Whitsunday Islands, central Queensland. B. Barker (2004) Volume 21: What’s changing: population size or land-use patterns? The archaeology of Upper Mangrove Creek, Sydney Basin. V. Attenbrow (2004) Volume 22: The Archaeology of the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia. S. O’Connor, M. Spriggs and P. Veth (2005) Volume 23: Pieces of the Vanuatu Puzzle: Archaeology of the North, South and Centre. S. Bedford (2006) terra australis 23 Pieces of the Vanuatu Puzzle: Archaeology of the North, South and Centre Stuart Bedford This edition © 2006 ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Email: [email protected] Web: http://epress.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Bedford, Stuart. Pieces of the Vanuatu puzzle: archaeology of the north, south and centre. Bibliography. ISBN 1 74076 093 X (pbk). ISBN 978 1 921313 03 5 1. Lapita culture — Vanuatu. 2. Archaeology — Vanuatu. 3. Vanuatu. I. Title. (Series : Terra Australis ; 23). 995.95 Cover: Area A excavation, Ponamla, Erromango (photo: S. Bedford). Back cover map: Hollandia Nova. Thevenot 1663 by courtesy of the National Library of Australia. Reprinted with permission of the National Library of Australia. Copyright of the text remains with the contributors/authors, 2006. This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Series Editor: Sue O’Connor Typesetting and design: Emily Brissenden Foreword STUART BEDFORD was born in New Zealand in 1960. He received his BA and MA degrees from the University of Auckland in 1982 and 1994 respectively. In between he gained valuable archaeological field experience as Assistant Archaeologist with the Clutha Valley Archaeology Project, Cromwell, New Zealand and then as Archaeologist and finally Supervisory Archaeologist with the Museum of London in the UK. I first met Stuart in 1994 at the notorious World Archaeological Congress in New Delhi. He had already applied for a PhD scholarship at ANU and got the thumbs up when he returned from his Indian travels. He arrived in the then-Division of Archaeology and Natural History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in 1995. He arrived at ANU at just the right moment. The 1985 to 1994 research ban in Vanuatu had just been lifted under the enlightened policies of new Vanuatu National Museum Director, Ralph Regenvanu. There were many archaeological questions to answer there concerning whether Vanuatu had been occupied in the Pleistocene period, on the stratigraphy and pottery sequence at the Mangaasi type-site on Efate, the cultural sequence of the ethnographically-rich (but little known archaeologically) island of Malakula in the north, the biological anthropology of the Vanuatu population, and the stylistic analysis and external connections of Vanuatu rock art, among a range of other topics. Clearly, with all these projects and potential projects there were numerous opportunities for PhD and other thesis projects and I set about recruiting suitable candidates. Stuart was among the first crop, which also included Nicola van Dijk and Meredith Wilson. Stuart’s family had earlier had business contacts in Vanuatu and so he had a ready-made social circuit of family friends in Port Vila to help him settle in to the rigours of fieldwork. Very soon after arriving he met his future wife, Caroline Brunet, daughter of a long-established French family in Vanuatu. Suitably distracted he began fieldwork on Erromango in mid-1995, investigating the site of Ponamla, an immediately post-Lapita pottery site found by one of the National Museum filwokas, Sempit Naritantop. During this trip he quickly picked up the lingua franca of Vanuatu, Bislama, and clearly displayed exactly the right attitudes and manner to fit him for independent fieldwork in local conditions. Museum Director Ralph Regenvanu and I then accompanied Stuart to Northwest Malakula to introduce him to a new fieldwork area. After an initial misunderstanding by our party which left both Ralph and I embarrassed and necessitated a custom ‘fine’ and elaborate kava ceremony in recompense, we left Stuart to fend for himself. This he did admirably in what — as we had already discovered to our cost — was a very politically and culturally-sensitive environment. His collaboration with local filwoka Jimmyson Sanhanbath was a major key to his success in this regard, as I know he would be the first to admit. In 1996 Stuart carried out field work on Erromango and Malakula, and that year we had also begun the re-excavation of the Mangaasi-Arapus site on Efate Island. This project lasted, with only one year without fieldwork, from 1996 to 2003. Stuart also undertook the analysis of the pottery and other artefact sequences from that site. Only some of those analyses appeared in the PhD and in this monograph resulting from it, as the PhD was awarded in 2000 when excavations were still underway. In 2000 Stuart took up the job of Regional Archaeologist for Auckland and Northland at the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. He was able to persuade the Trust to allow him a period of leave-without-pay each year to pursue his Vanuatu researches. Apart from jointly-directing the continuing Mangaasi-Arapus excavations, he also developed and gained funding from the Sasakawa Pacific Island Nations Fund and other sources for a project on the Small Islands off NE Malakula which has produced spectacular results in terms of finding Lapita settlements — of which he had found only a hint in his PhD research in NW Malakula — on several of the islands investigated, and in the recovery of painted Lapita vessels. He has subsequently extended his Malakula research to the Maskelyne Islands to the SE of Malakula. Early in 2004 Stuart was involved in the location of a major Lapita site at Teouma on the island of Efate, just outside the capital Port Vila by staff of the Vanuatu National Museum. The Museum asked Stuart and I to secure funding for a salvage excavation of the site, which had been impacted by quarrying activities. We were able to secure funding from the Pacific Biological Foundation and again Stuart’s legendary ‘finder’s luck’ has come into play with the excavation of what has turned out to be the oldest cemetery site yet found in the Pacific. Also in 2004 Stuart and I put together an ARC application for a comprehensive program of research in Northern Vanuatu to investigate inter-island and inter-archipelago relations during prehistory. This was successful and has allowed Stuart to return to the ANU early in 2005 as an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow and to complete turning his PhD into a Terra Australis Series monograph. Given current time and financial restrictions on PhD students a project of the scope of Stuart’s PhD would no longer be contemplated today.