Lapita – A View from the East (New Zealand Archaeological Association Monograph 24) by Simon Best ISBN 9780959791570, 0959791574, 01115715 instant download

Lapita – A View from the East (New Zealand Archaeological Association Monograph 24) by Simon Best ISBN 9780959791570, 0959791574, 01115715 instant download

The first colonisers of Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the Lapita peoples, brought with them a ceramic technology notable for an extraordinary system of decora- tion. Within a few hundred years, perhaps between 300-400 in the easternmost areas, the pots themselves had undergone a marked simplification in form, while the decoration had vanished completely. In Tonga and Samoa pottery itself was to di sappear by about the end of the first millennium B.C., while in Fiji at much the same time the ceramic sequence underwent the most drastic change in its 3000 year hi story. The ancestors of these travellers came from far to the west, initially from the various small island groups lying off the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea, and before that from Island Southeast Asia. Th eir descendants went on the colonise Hawaii, Polynesia and New Zealand. Their early style of pottery however, save for one sherd on the north coast of New Guinea, has not been found west of those island groups or east of Samoa and Tonga. The focus of this monograph is an attempt to enter the "thought world" of the people(s) who made the Lapita pots, through the role of the ceramics, especially those with unusual forms and complex and often anthropomorphic decoration s. Any "meaning" these have, and any change in this, it is sugges ted, is inexorably intertwined with other aspects of the society's lifeways - with other artifacts, with the eastern expansion from the Bismarcks, with social ran.Icing and site organisation, with settlement patterns and, in the furthermost reached islands at least, with the ultimate loss of the ceramics themselves.