Post-Lapita Evolutions or Revolutions? Interaction and Exchange in Island Melanesia: The View from the Tanga Islands

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is the period of apparent cultural ‘transition’ or transformation in the archaeology of Island Melanesia in the closing centuries of the third millennium BP. This transformation has long been tied to an ill-defined and much debated ‘Incised and Applied Relief’ ceramic tradition, and in the western part of this region is seen as marking the ‘end’ of Lapita in the transition from the ‘Late Lapita’ to ‘Post-Lapita’ periods. I examine this ‘transition’ by taking a multi-pronged approach to the consideration of social interaction and exchange, in particular in terms of cultural continuities (‘evolutions’) and discontinuities (‘revolutions’) across it. Based on new research in the Tanga Islands and supplemented by the further examination of a group of sites on the New Ireland mainland, the thesis employs two broad types of data to track interaction—compositional and stylistic—which are gleaned from the analysis of pottery, obsidian and red ochre. Its aim is to tease out the complexities of interaction and cultural change at the ‘transition’ indicated by both the match and mismatch of the evidence from these different archaeological data sets. The thesis concludes that Tanga and other ‘transitional’ sites from the Bismarck Archipelago to New Caledonia were embedded in a number of different overlapping and interconnected interaction networks of different spatial and temporal scales and likely cultural significance. These networks reflected webs of relationships and aspects of shared identity and history on both more localised and broader regional levels, and incorporated elements of both stylistic similarityand difference, and cultural continuity and discontinuity with Lapita. It finds that there is indeed some utility to a considerably revised notion of the ‘Incised and Applied Relief Tradition’: one that is both more and less strictly defined. Show more