Post-Lapita developments in the Reef-Santa Cruz Islands, southeast Solomon Islands

Abstract

The Pacific is a world of islands, so human migrations are necessarily part of the story of this world. It is somewhat surprising therefore to find that there are so many points of contention among archaeologists, linguists and biologists about the role that migrations have played in producing culture change in Pacific prehistory -just how many migrations are we talking about, on what scale, by whom, and when, and which discipline provides more reliable evidence? The specifics of the debate may be local, but the substantive issues have broader applicability. This thesis attempts to contribute to the debate by considering the archaeological evidence for a hypothesised migration during the post-Lapita period of people speaking non-Austronesian languages into the Main Reef and Santa Cruz Islands in the southeast Solomon Islands. It describes the theoretical and methodological difficulties in trying to assess whether cladistic or rhizotic processes best account for culture change. Previously unpublished archaeological material from two Main Reef Islands sites is presented, and is compared with the linguistic and human biological evidence pertinent to the case study. The narratives of cross-cultural encounters during the historic period are examined to investigate how such interactions produce change in cultural traditions, and to assess the archaeological visibility of these contacts. While the archaeological record testifies to cultural borrowings and lendings in the Reef-Santa Cruz case, the argument for either large-scale population intrusion or replacement is not well supported. The archaeological record appears to be in conflict with the prevailing interpretation of history reconstructed from historical linguistics and human genetics.