Why did people board boats on the shores of Southeast Asia some 60,000 years ago and travel eastward from island to island until they reached eastern Polynesia and the west coast of South America? Although the motivations for taking these risky voyages may be difficult to identify, archaeologists can reconstruct the technology of how they were done, the routes that were taken, and how people and communities adapted as they entered new island environments. This story of modern human migration into pristine contexts is one of the most complex and fascinating reconstructions of human dispersal that archaeologists have formulated and also one of the most intriguing in terms of human adaptability. The editors have condensed this saga into 21 chapters written by seasoned scholars. This handbook summarizes comprehensively the culture sequences and archaeological findings of the many regions. Many contributors, however, are critical of some widely accepted models of human behavior; they challenge hypotheses directly and suggest new interpretations based on their data syntheses. This is one of the major strengths of the book.
The editors set the stage for independent contributions by identifying three major areas of debate. The first centers on human population origins and dispersal before the Holocene and then the later, rapid dispersal of Austronesian language groups under the proxy of Lapita pottery approximately 3,500 years ago from Remote Oceania into Near Oceania and West Polynesia. The second focus is on human interconnectivity, as evident from distributions of obsidian, ceramics, and basalt artifacts; similarities in architecture; and what these patterns indicate about the routes of dispersal and the networks that emerged after colonization and settlement. Lastly, the editors wish to contribute to knowledge about the emergence of complexity in human societies. What factors might account for variability in the chiefdom political structure between Polynesia and Micronesia?
The volume is structured geographically. Each chapter discusses a region, island group, or an individual island, moving eastward from the islands of Southeast Asia. There is a very good general summary of human dispersal from Wallacea into Sahul and considerations of data consistent with alternate routes to what is now New Guinea and Australia, coupled with an overview of varying ecologies, hunting practices, animal extinctions, and regional technologies. The discussion then quickly changes to the dispersal of the interisland Lapita “community of practice” and changes in the strength of its interconnectedness over time. Many of the concepts associated with Lapita culture receive intense scrutiny and evaluation of their conceptual rigor. For example, the summary model of Lapita as a series of short-term events with language, genes, and material culture traveling as an Out-of-Taiwan package is seriously challenged. The long-accepted Triple-I model of Roger Green is considered overly general and historically uninformative, because there are many scenarios that could account for the distribution of Lapita ceramics and speech traditions.
Moving on to the edge of West Polynesia and Fiji, the questions asked become more processual in nature. Much research has been concerned with the post-Lapita emergence of regional chiefdoms and fortified villages, which, it is argued, reflects competition for agricultural land. On an island where not much archaeology has been completed in the last 50 years, basic questions are raised about why colonization occurred, why subsistence varied, the nature of the links to Tonga and Melanesia, and emerging social complexity.
For Polynesia, very good regional summaries cover the Hawaiian archipelago, New Zealand and surrounding islands, and central East Polynesia. The prehistory of New Zealand is particularly intriguing because patterns of settlement and exchange have been clearly linked to the depletion of terrestrial and marine resources. A shift to intensive agriculture in the North Island by AD 1500, however, did not lead to a strong hierarchical structure typical of many Polynesian high islands.
More postprocessual-like considerations are also scattered throughout the volume. In New Caledonia, it is noted how a harsh colonial history can structure the interpretation of the archaeological record to justify the separation of the postcontact Kanak population from their land and resources. In New Guinea, we are warned that wholesale adoptions of ethnographic models for use in interpretations of the past can result in missing unique social configurations that might have been operative in the high-population regions of the highlands. Finally, the “paradox of Rapa Nui” is addressed: How can megalithic architecture exist on a resource-impoverished island? The hypothesis is put forth that the large and architecturally similar ahu reflect a form of “cost signaling” indicative of group membership and cooperation, a strategy that reduced resource uncertainty and resulted in the avoidance of societal collapse.
Other valuable contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania focus on linguistics, sailing, and the methodology of settlement pattern studies. If I were to tweet a Monday morning criticism, it would be that the book should have more illustrations and that the photographs in the Rapa Nui chapter are terrible. Putting aside these less important comments, it is certainly worthwhile to add this volume to your scholarly library and to adopt it for graduate seminars.
