Friction zones in Lapita colonisation

Lapita Writ Small? Revisiting the Austronesian Colonisation of the Papuan South Coast

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 th...

Phylogenetic analyses of Lapita decoration do not support branching evolution or regional population structure during colonization of Remote Oceania.

Intricately decorated Lapita pottery (3100-2700 BP) was made and deposited by the prehistoric colonizers of Pacific islands, east of the main Solomon's chain. For decades, analyses of this pottery have focused on the ancestor-descendant relationships of populations and the relative degree of interaction across the region to explain similarities in Lapita decoration. Cladistic analyses, increasi...

Diet and Human Mobility from the Lapita to the Early Historic Period on Uripiv Island, Northeast Malakula, Vanuatu

Vanuatu was first settled ca. 3000 years ago by populations associated with the Lapita culture. Models of diet, subsistence practices, and human interaction for the Lapita and subsequent occupation periods have been developed mainly using the available archaeological and paleoenvironmental data. We test these models using stable (carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur) and radiogenic (strontium) isotopes...

The spread of the 'Lapita people': a demographic simulation

The authors used simulation to examine the viability of current theory concerning the expansion of the 'Lapita Cultural Complex' in the Southwestern Pacific region. Their simulation program, based on simple rules, generated a series of virtual colonies over time using a wide range of parameter values. These runs showed potential inconsistency about the speed of 'Lapita people', hence raising ne...