Lapita and Proto-Oceanic

Linguistics and archaeology have been, and continue to be, entwined in the discourse on the early human history of the Pacific. It is commonly assumed, explicitly or otherwise, that the bearers of the Lapita culture were speakers of Proto-Oceanic, the ancestor of the Austronesian languages of most of the Pacific. In this discursive piece, the chronological data for the location and timing of the emergence of Lapita pottery are compared with the linguistic data for the source region of Proto-Oceanic. Although both pottery and proto-language may possibly originate in the same location, this is not the most likely scenario if the evidence from the two disciplines is evaluated independently. There is no necessary historical association for the emergence of the Proto-Oceanic language and Lapita pottery. The Proto-Oceanic language and Lapita pottery should not be assumed to represent a single historical vector, as is commonly the case; rather, they should be considered discrete and separate historical phenomena. IT IS NOW WIDELY ASSUMED IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC CIRCLES THAT THE culture that produced Lapita pots in Melanesia spoke the Proto-Oceanic language, the ancestral language of Austronesian languages in Near and Remote Oceania. (A notable exception is Terrell et al.) Based on the convergence of findings of research within their respective fields of linguistics and archaeology, Pawley and Green made an early and explicit claim: ‘The material cultures initiating the archaeological sequence on each island group so far investigated in this area can be strongly associated with Austronesian languages’. They later declared that ‘the arguments for connecting bearers of the Lapita cultural complex with the dispersal of dialects of Proto-Oceanic now seem much stronger than they did a decade ago’. From these initially tentative associations, there are Mark Donohue, Department of Linguistics; School of Culture, History & Language; College of Asia and the Pacific; Australian National University. E-mail: [email protected] Tim Denham, Archaeology Program, Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University. E-mail: [email protected] 1 John Terrell, Terry L. Hunt, and Joel Bradshaw, ‘On the location of the Proto-Oceanic homeland’, Pacific Studies, 25:3 (2002), 57–93. 2 Andrew Pawley and Roger Green, ‘Dating the dispersal of the Oceanic languages’, Oceanic Linguistics, 12:1/2 (1973), 2. 3 Andrew Pawley and Roger Green, ‘The Proto-Oceanic language community’, The Journal of Pacific History, 19 (1984), 142. ISSN 0022-3344 print; 1469-9605 online/12/040443–15; Taylor & Francis 2012 The Journal of Pacific History Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2012.742609 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ar k D on oh ue ] at 0 9: 08 1 0 D ec em be r 20 12 now more widespread and forthright statements. Pawley has reiterated this position: ‘The bearers of the Early Lapita culture who occupied parts of the Bismarck Archipelago around 3300 BP can be equated with the speech community that spoke Proto Oceanic, the Austronesian interstage that was the immediate ancestor of all the Oceanic languages’; ‘the initial spread of the Lapita culture and the initial dispersal of the Oceanic languages were part of one and the same event’; and, even more definitely, ‘by 3300 BP there were Lapita settlements at or close to at least three corners of the Bismarck quadrilateral and at certain points inside it . . . these communities spoke an Austronesian language of the Oceanic branch’. Kirch similarly assumes that the Lapita record and the history reconstructed by linguistic methodologies are congruent: ‘The archaeological model and its dating are remarkably consistent with the internal relationships or subgrouping (the ‘‘family tree’’) of the Austronesian languages as worked out through careful linguistic comparisons’. Similar assumptions are reasserted by Sheppard and in associated comments by Pawley and Ross, namely that the Bismarck Archipelago is the region from which Lapita pottery and Oceanic languages dispersed. Despite these repeated assertions, the question of the location of the culture that introduced and spoke Proto-Oceanic is a logically separate question to that of the location of the earliest Lapita sites in Island Melanesia. One question addresses a linguistic problem, and the other, an archaeological problem. Although the answers to these two questions may be related by virtue of a possible correlation between likely homelands, the people involved, and later dispersals, this needs to be demonstrated. It should not be repeatedly assumed that the bearers of Lapita pottery spoke Proto-Oceanic languages and that the two phenomena originated in the Bismarck Archipelago, from whence they spread eastward. In order to avoid circularity and conflation, the two questions should be investigated separately, and only then should the answers be compared. Such a method is adopted and followed in this paper. In this discussion piece, we re-evaluate the assumption that the origins of Lapita pottery and Proto-Oceanic languages are necessarily associated. Andrew Pawley, ‘The origins of early Lapita culture: the testimony of historical linguistics’, in Stuart Bedford, Christophe Sand, and Sean P. Connaughton (eds), Oceanic Explorations: Lapita and Western Pacific settlement (Canberra 2007), 18. 5 Ibid., 25. 6 Andrew Pawley, ‘Where and when was Proto-Oceanic spoken? Archaeological and linguistic evidence’, in Yury A. Lander and Alexander K. Oglobin (eds), Language and Text in the Austronesian World: studies in honour of Ülo Sirk (Munich 2008), 61. 7 Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: an archaeological history of the Pacific Islands before European contact (Berkeley 2000), 92. 8 Peter J. Sheppard, ‘Lapita colonization across the Near/Remote Oceania boundary’, Current Anthropology, 52:6 (2011), 799–840. 9 Andrew Pawley, ‘Comment to ‘‘Lapita colonization across the Near/Remote Oceania boundary’’’, Current Anthropology, 52:6 (2011), 825–26. Malcolm Ross, ‘Comment to ‘‘Lapita colonization across the Near/Remote Oceania boundary’’’, Current Anthropology, 52:6 (2011), 826–27. 11 See Stephen Oppenheimer, ‘The ‘‘express train’’ from Taiwan to Polynesia: on the congruence of proxy lines of evidence’, World Archaeology, 36:4 (2004), 591–600. 444 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY D ow nl oa de d by [ M ar k D on oh ue ] at 0 9: 08 1 0 D ec em be r 20 12 First, we review the chronological evidence for the emergence and dispersal of Lapita, with reference to a new Bayesian analysis of relevant radiocarbon dates. The sole intention of the chronological review is to determine the region in which Lapita first occurred; it is not to discuss other aspects of this relatively welldocumented cultural efflorescence. Second, we present a thorough methodological examination of the historical linguistic evidence to determine the most likely homeland for Proto-Oceanic languages. Third, we consider the degree of congruence or disjuncture between the archaeological and linguistic evidence. It emerges that the data from the two disciplines are separate and, when assessed independently, raise important questions about the complexities of the prehistory of this part of the world. The Chronology of Early Lapita Lapita pottery is one of the most distinctive archaeological phenomena in Oceanic (pre)history. Lapita pottery is generally considered to have derived from red-slipped pottery in Island Southeast Asia; an indigenist view of Lapita is now a minor and marginal opinion. The cultural associations of Lapita pottery, whether part of a cultural complex or representing a distinctive way of life, are much debated and unclear within Near Oceania and are not entirely clear for some of the proximal regions of Remote Oceania, such as Vanuatu. These issues, together with those associated with the transformation of Lapita pottery through time (such as design simplification eastwards), are not addressed here. The sole focus of this section is to present recently derived chronological data that locates the region in which Lapita pottery emerged; namely, the intention is to ascertain the location of the earliest Lapita sites in 12 Patrick Vinton Kirch, The Lapita Peoples: ancestors of the Oceanic world (Oxford 1997); Matthew Spriggs, The Island Melanesians (Oxford 1997). 13 For example, Kirch, The Lapita Peoples. 14 For example, Matthew Spriggs, ‘Chronology of the Neolithic transition in Island Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific: a view from 2003’, Review of Archaeology, 24:2 (2003), 57–80; Matthew Spriggs, ‘The Neolithic and Austronesian expansion within Island Southeast Asia and into the Pacific’, in Scarlett Chiu and Christophe Sand (eds), From Southeast Asia to the Pacific: archaeological perspectives on the Austronesian expansion and the Lapita cultural complex (Taipei 2007), 104–40. 15 For example, Jim Allen and J. Peter White, ‘The Lapita homeland: some new data and an interpretation’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 98:2 (1989), 129–46. R.C. Green, ‘The Lapita cultural complex: current evidence and proposed models’, Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin, 11 (1991), 295–305. 17 Spriggs, The Island Melanesians. 18 Stuart Bedford, Matthew Spriggs, and Ralph Regenvanu, ‘The Teouma Lapita site and the early human settlement of the Pacific Islands’, Antiquity, 80:310 (2006), 812–28; Mark Donohue and Tim Denham, ‘The language of Lapita: Vanuatu and an early Papuan presence in the Pacific’, Oceanic Linguistics, 47:2 (2008), 433–44. Glenn Summerhayes, Lapita Interaction (Canberra 2000); Glenn Summerhayes, ‘The rise and transformation of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago’, in Chiu and Sand (eds), From Southeast Asia to the Pacific, 129–72. LAPITA AND PROTO-OCEANIC 445 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ar k D on oh ue ] at 0 9: 08 1 0 D ec em be r 20 12