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A Shark Going Inland is My Chief
The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai'i
By Patrick Vinton Kirch UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Patrick Vinton Kirch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95383-3
CHAPTER 1
A Trail of Tattooed Pots
In August 1985, after a wearying journey from Seattle via Honolulu and Sydney, I stepped off a Qantas jet in Port Moresby, the dusty capital of Papua New Guinea. I was en route to Kavieng, a small town in the country's New Ireland province, several hundred miles to the north. There, I would meet up with the ship Dick Smith Explorer and members of the Lapita Homeland Project. Our goal was to find the origins of the Lapita culture, believed to be the ancestors of the Polynesians. The Dick Smith Explorer would take me to my final destination, the Mussau Islands on the outer arc of the Bismarck Archipelago. Before continuing on my journey to Kavieng and Mussau, however, I wanted to visit Papua New Guinea's National Museum. I needed to have a firsthand look at some Lapita finds that had been recovered a decade earlier in remote Mussau.
The museum's curator, Pam Swadling, greeted me warmly and introduced me to Johnny Saulo, a staff member who came from Mussau. With Johnny, I walked through the public gallery filled with imposing Sepik River cult house carvings and crocodile-headed dugout canoes. Johnny turned a key and we ducked through a doorway leading back into the storage room where the archaeological collections are kept. Traipsing down a musty aisle illuminated by bare light bulbs, we located several wooden trays where Brian Egloff's Lapita specimens were stored. Egloff had made a brief expedition to Mussau in 1973 after local missionaries had found pottery sherds while clearing a small airstrip. He later excavated a few squares; from one of these he had obtained a radiocarbon date of about 1900 B.C. It was the oldest date known for Lapita pottery.
Johnny and I laid the trays on a workbench. In front of us were a few hundred small pottery sherds, many covered with characteristic fine-toothed stamped designs. The ancient Lapita culture had first been recognized because of these unique designs. In 1952, at a place called Lapita on the northwestern coast of New Caledonia, Professor Edward Gifford of the University of California at Berkeley had found this kind of pottery. Gifford, a senior professor in the waning days of his career, had gone to New Caledonia to seek the origins of the Polynesians. A few years earlier he had dug in Viti Levu in the Fiji archipelago, uncovering a rich succession of pottery types that pointed to a western origin for the people who had migrated into this part of the Pacific. Turning to the large island of New Caledonia—virtually unexplored up to that time by archaeologists—he hoped that he might find traces of even earlier settlements.
At Lapita, toward the end of his six-month-long expedition, Gifford hit pay dirt. In a series of trenches excavated into the sandy earth not far from the shoreline, Gifford and his student Dick Shutler found quantities of distinctively decorated pottery sherds. A comb-like tool with rows of tiny "teeth" had been impressed into the clay surface of the pots, in complex patterns. (Archaeologists call the technique dentate stamping.) Gifford had seen such sherds before, in Tonga, where in 1920 as a young fieldworker he and his colleague W.C. McKern had dug into kitchen middens. He also knew that similar pottery had been found by the Dutch archaeologist Van Stein Callenfels on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Gifford suddenly realized that he had a clue to the long-standing problem of Polynesian origins: a chain of evidence linking Southeast Asia with the Polynesian island of Tongatapu, via New Caledonia. Gifford became even more excited when, after returning to Berkeley, he received the first radiocarbon dates of charcoal he had excavated along with the potsherds. The charcoal gave an age of about 2,800 years before the present, plus or minus 350 years, making these among the oldest artifacts then known from any Pacific island. Gifford had opened up a new window onto the Polynesian past. He was on the trail of the Polynesian ancestors, including those who eventually discovered and settled Hawai'i.
After Gifford and Shutler made their remarkable discoveries on New Caledonia, other archaeologists began to pursue the Lapita trail. Jack Golson and his students from the Australian National University returned to New Caledonia to pick up where Gifford had left off. They also dug sites in Tonga, and on the island of Watom in the Bismarck Archipelago. Roger Green, with Honolulu's Bishop Museum, turned his sights in the early 1970s to Santa Cruz and the Reef Islands at the far eastern end of the Solomon archipelago. He too found rich Lapita deposits, again full of pottery with those distinctive toothed, tattoolike decorations.
By 1984 a significant body of new data was emerging about what archaeologists were now calling the Lapita cultural complex. Green argued that Lapita represented the ancestors of the oldest Polynesian cultures, found in Tonga and Samoa. In his view, Proto-Polynesian culture had evolved out of this Lapita ancestor during the first millennium B.C., in the Tongan and Samoan islands. Later, according to Green, their descendants again voyaged to the east, where they settled the islands of Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, and ultimately Hawai'i. What especially excited the anthropologists was that Lapita spanned the boundary between Polynesia and Melanesia. It thus appeared to be the founding culture throughout the entire southwestern Pacific. Lapita was the key to the puzzle of Polynesian origins.
As Johnny and I turned over in our hands the small, dusty potsherds from Egloff's Mussau excavations in the Papua New Guinea museum's storeroom, I pondered how little was still known about the earliest phases of the Lapita culture. Some scholars even questioned whether Lapita was a part of the greater diaspora of Austronesian-speaking peoples out of Taiwan and Southeast Asia. These contrarians argued that Lapita had an independent origin in the New Guinea region. The Lapita Homeland Project, which I would soon join, was designed to resolve these questions. We needed to know more not only about the origins of Lapita, but also about the nature of this early culture. Were they, as some had suggested, "strand-loopers" who subsisted merely by exploiting the bounty of the region's tropical reefs and seas, or did they possess a fully developed horticultural economy? Were they highly mobile, or did they occupy large, permanent villages? What was the nature of their social organization? Was theirs an egalitarian society or did they have some form of inherited rank and status? These and many other questions remained to be answered.
It was clear to me that the fragmentary sherds in these dusty drawers in the National Museum were not going to give me any new answers. New and carefully targeted field research was needed. A few days later, after clearing all of the government formalities in Port Moresby, I boarded my Air New Guinea plane to Kavieng, the capital of New Ireland Province. At the small Kavieng airstrip I was greeted by Jim Allen, a professor at Australia's La Trobe University and organizer of the international Lapita Homeland Project.
"The Dick Smith Explorer is a couple of days behind schedule, Pat," Jim informed me. "But this will give us time to go down to Panakiwuk, where you can have a firsthand look at our recent finds." Jim was referring to a limestone rock shelter about four hours' drive south of Kavieng, where he had been excavating with Rhys Jones and Chris Gosden of the Australian National University. Piling my gear into the Land Rover, we headed down the dirt track that serves as the principal highway on New Ireland. The next morning, Jim led me up a slippery trail into the island's central limestone spine. Panakiwuk is a smallish overhang on one face of a great sinkhole, a place where more than twenty thousand years ago people took refuge from the elements while hunting marsupials and foraging for wild tubers or fruit. Jim's excavations had opened a new window into the truly deep past of Near Oceania, showing that humans had occupied these islands thousands of years before the Austronesians arrived with their distinctive pottery. It was all exciting and fascinating, and made me more eager than ever to get up to Mussau and begin my own fieldwork.
The following day Jim drove me back up to Kavieng, where the Dick Smith Explorer had now anchored in the harbor. On the wharf I met Pru Gaffey and Sally Brockwell, two Australian archaeology students who would assist me in Mussau. We quickly rounded up additional supplies in the little Chinese trade stores in Kavieng town, loaded them in the hold of the Dick Smith Explorer, and prepared to weigh anchor.
* * *
The Lapita story is part of an even larger saga of human migration that begins on the shores of Fujian and Guangdong provinces along the South China coast, and on the nearby island of Taiwan. In this coastal region rich in resources and blessed with a subtropical climate, an early maritime culture flourished around the fourth to third millennia B.C. Recently, Chinese archaeologists have unearthed numerous traces of these people, who made distinctive earthenware pottery often decorated by cord-marking. Cord-wrapped paddles were used to beat the surface of the pottery vessels and thin them before firing. My former professor and adviser at Yale University, the famous Kwang-Chih Chang, had excavated at the site of Tap'enk'eng, not far from Taiwan's capital of Taipei. K.C., as he always referred to himself, was one of the first to recognize that these archaeological sites containing cord-marked pottery marked a major stage in the evolution of Southeast Asian cultures.
The pioneering work of K.C. and others who followed him showed that Tap'enk'eng and similar cord-marked pottery sites around Taiwan and along the coasts of south China represent the emergence of early Austronesian culture. (The Greek roots of this term translate as "southern islands.") Austronesian refers to a group of people speaking related languages who are dispersed from Madagascar off the African coast to remote Easter Island, an astounding distance of more than thirteen thousand miles. There are about twelve hundred modern Austronesian languages, all members of a single language family that gradually diversified from an original proto-language spoken in the Taiwan–South China region about six thousand years ago. Hawaiian is an Austronesian language, as are all of the other languages of Polynesia and most of those in island Melanesia and Micronesia. The indigenous languages of the Philippines, and those of Indonesia, are also Austronesian. Peoples who speak these languages all trace their roots back to the shores of Taiwan and Fujian, where their distant ancestors lived in small villages like Tap'enk'eng, making simple earthenware pottery and experimenting with a new way of life that paired horticulture with sophisticated knowledge of the sea.
These Proto-Austronesians were part of a great cultural transformation that anthropologists call the Neolithic revolution: the transition from a hunting-and-gathering mode of existence to a settled village life based on the domestication of plants and animals, and on the dependable surplus production these could provide. The early Austronesians cultivated rice along with other roots and tubers, such as taro and yams, and tree crops such as bananas. They raised pigs and chickens, and probably also dogs. Living along the subtropical shores of Taiwan and China, these people possessed an intimate knowledge of the rich resources of the region's bays, estuaries, and reefs. They knew the habits of the diverse kinds of fish and shellfish that teemed in these waters; they invented various kinds of fishhooks, spears, and nets, and used natural plant poisons to catch fish. Early Austronesian archaeological sites are full of fishbones and shellfish remains, along with fishhooks made from Trochus shell and net weights and line sinkers of stone, all testifying to the abilities of early Austronesians to capture the natural bounty of their coastal waters.
Most important, the early Austronesians invented one of the most remarkable technologies of the premodern world: the outrigger sailing canoe. Chinese archaeologists have dug up preserved parts of simple wooden canoes from swampy deposits at the site of Kuahuqiao, dated to 6000 to 5000 B.C. The existence of regular maritime traffic between Taiwan and the Chinese coast can be traced through the transport of stone adzes (an implement similar to an ax in function, but hafted so that the blade cuts in a stroke toward the user). Historical linguists, who reconstruct ancient languages based on the systematic comparison of words in the many languages descended from a common ancestral tongue, tell us that the early Austronesian vocabulary was rich in words for the outrigger canoe, or wangka as the Proto-Austronesians called it.
The ancient Austronesian wangka had a single hull, presumably hewn with the stone adzes traded across the Taiwan Straits. By adding an outrigger float to one side of the canoe, they achieved greater buoyancy and stability in open seas. The outrigger was secured to the hull with wooden thwarts. In later Austronesian designs, these supported a small platform to hold people and cargo; even a small thatched house could be lashed to the platform between the hull and outrigger. What made the wangka such a marvelous instrument of exploration and expansion was not just the outrigger but the addition of a mast and sail, harnessing wind power for propulsion. The early Austronesians made their sails from the leaves of the pandanus tree, in the same way that they wove mats. Strips of woven matting were sewn together to form sails, lashed to the mast with ropes made from the tough fiber of coconut husks. With a large steering paddle at the stern, these canoes could transport entire families and their cargo along coasts and between islands. The wangka propelled the early Austronesians out of their original homeland along the protected shores of South China and Taiwan, into the Philippines and Indonesia, and along the northern coast of New Guinea out toward the islands of the Pacific. Ultimately, these marvelous sea craft would take their descendants as far as Madagascar in the west and to Easter Island in the east.
The Austronesian expansion has been traced by archaeologists, such as Australia's Peter Bellwood, out of the South China–Taiwan homeland region southward into the islands of the Philippine archipelago, along a trail of sites containing earthenware pottery, stone adzes, and other characteristic artifacts. In the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon, Austronesian pottery appears in sites such as Lal-lo and Magapit by about 2500 B.C. Soon after, similar sites with an Austronesian "signature" appear far to the east, in Sulawesi, Halmahera, and the small islands of the Moluccas. By about 1500 B.C., some of the Austronesians had skirted the northern shores of the large tropical island of New Guinea, arriving in the coral-rimmed islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, which includes Mussau. It was my task in 1985 to see where the Lapita finds first discovered by Egloff might fit into this emerging picture of the Austronesian diaspora.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Shark Going Inland is My Chief by Patrick Vinton Kirch. Copyright © 2012 Patrick Vinton Kirch. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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