Late prehistoric-early historic houses and settlement space on Nusa Roviana, New Georgia Group, Solomon Islands

Abstract

This thesis examines house sites, settlements, and landscapes in the late prehistoric - early historic period in Roviana, New Georgia Group, the Solomon Islands. The focus of this study is Nusa Roviana, a small barrier island in the Roviana Lagoon, where past archaeological investigations documented large nucleated settlements. Those settlements were the politico-religious and residential centres of powerful coastal polities which conducted large-scale headhunting expeditions to neighbouring islands during the nineteenth century. Employing a household-archaeology approach, in combination with a "house society" perspective and practice theory, I investigate how houses and settlement space were socially constructed through everyday activities which meanwhile structured them, and were eventually transformed by them. Patterns of household variability within and among house sites are examined to understand their relation to spatial organization, temporal change, and socioeconomic diversity at the community level. This research provides a detailed picture of daily activities and social interaction in early historic villages, when islanders' active interaction with Europeans led to intensification of chiefs' political-economic activities, which revolved around shell valuable production and headhunting, and this further accelerated social stratification. Archaeological, historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data is synthesized to construct a model of changes in settlement space which reflected the long-term processes of economic, social, and ideological transformation. Development of large nucleated settlements was fundamentally related to dynamic socio-political process in late prehistoric to early historic Roviana society, in which social elites strove to construct an enduring house to maintain linkage to their ancestors and transmit the estate and its status to future generations. The emerging elites used spatial settings in settlement space to naturalise social differentiation and legitimate their political authority in a socially dynamic period during the nineteenth century, which in turn created, through time, a hierarchically organised settlement structure. Differing spatial and material patterning among individual settlements is interpreted as reflecting variation in political strategies and socio-political structure of coastal polities.