A History of the Pacific Islands

Steven Roger Fischer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780230362697
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350306721
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This wide-ranging study of the Pacific Islands provides a dynamic and provocative account of the peopling of the Pacific, and its broad impact on world history. Spanning over 50,000 years of human presence in an area which comprises one-third of our planet – Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia – the narrative follows the development of the region, from New Guinea's earliest settlement to the creation of the modern Pacific states.

Thoroughly revised and updated in light of the most recent scholarship, the second edition includes:
• an overview of the events and developments in the Pacific Islands over the last decade
• coverage of the latest archaeological discoveries
• several new maps
• an updated and expanded bibliography

Steven Roger Fischer's unique text provides a highly accessible and invaluable introduction to the history of an area which is currently emerging as pivotal in international affairs.
A History of the Pacific Islands traces the human history of nearly one-third of the globe over a fifty-thousand year span. This is history on a grand scale, taking the islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia from prehistoric culture to the present day through a skilful interpretation of scholarship in the field. Fischer's familiarity with work in archaeology and anthropology as well as in history enriches the text, making this a book with wide appeal for students and general readers.

1

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The First Islanders

FROM SUNDA TO SAHUL

Sea levels were as much as 120 metres lower than today’s during the last Ice Age – the Pleistocene epoch – which lasted from 1.8 million to 12,000 years ago. Southeast Asia then included the maritime subcontinent of Sunda, that ancient and immense ‘Boot of Asia’ which separated the South China Sea from the Indian Ocean (Map 1). East and southeast of the Sunda subcontinent lay enormous Sahul: ancient Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea, which were then still connected as one massive continent.

Sahul’s separation from Sunda throughout the Pleistocene epoch demarcated not only land but also mammals. Sahul’s primitive marsupials (pouch-bearers like kangaroos and opossums) and monotremes (primitive mammals like the duck-billed platypus and several species of anteater) remained distinct from the more evolved placental mammals of the Old World, that is Asia, Europe and Africa. This is an important consideration with regard to the presence of humans in the Pacific as humans are also placental mammals. From this consideration one can deduce that any early humans in Sahul probably came from the Old World. However, many Aboriginal Australians and Papuans (the indigenous people of New Guinea and parts of the Solomon Islands) believe that humans are autochthons, descendants of the spiritual ancestors of Dreamtime.

There might be something tangible to the indigenous belief, though the true story would differ significantly from the Aboriginal Australian and Papuan account. Sunda, or subcontinental Southeast Asia, was already home to the hominin species Homo erectus at the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch. We now know that sometime between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago a small flotilla of Homo erectus migrants, probably carrying an entire community that had devised watercraft of bamboo-log rafts expressly for the purpose, deliberately crossed Wallace’s Line, the 17 (now 24)-kilometre wide strait separating Sunda from the Indonesian island of Lombok. The line has always been one of the world’s major biological boundaries, separating the fauna of Asia from that of Australia and Oceania. That this Homo erectus community would have effected the sea migration deliberately is deduced from the fact that they drifted even further than Lombok: they went on to settle Flores Island east of Lombok, rapidly causing the extinction of pygmy stegodons (bony-plated quadrupeds) there nearly one million years ago. On Flores Island they also left behind stone tools and dietary remains, which archaeologists discovered in 1997.

It is a contentious issue whether Homo erectus ever ventured further than Sunda’s offshore islands. Only related or descendant hominin species appear to have progressed all the way to the continent of Sahul. Discovered on Flores in 2003 were the remains of what appeared to be diminutive humans, since named Homo floresiensis—otherwise known as ‘hobbits’. Fossil hominins between 90,000 and 18,000 years old, the forms of the hobbits can be explained by one of three hypotheses: that their very small heads were the result of a congenital condition, that they were dwarf Australopithecus or early Homo or that island dwarfism led to their evolution from Homo erectus or even from Homo sapiens. At present, the second explanation finds greatest acceptance. The exact origin of the first hominins in Sahul itself is equally unclear. Australian archaeologists announced in 2001 that an archaic human skeleton had been discovered at Lake Mungo – today a dry lake in southwestern New South Wales – and subsequently dated, using three different techniques, as being 60,000 years old; other studies, however, estimate that it is 40,000 years old. As the skeleton indicated a DNA sequencing different from that of Australia’s Aborigines, it was suggested that it might represent a hominin species which had not survived evolution. Perhaps it had been a precursor of Homo sapiens sapiens or anatomically modern humans in the region, as some now hypothesize. Archaic human societies were likely to be far more genetically complex than that Trinity of early human species – Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens – still popularly peddled today. But the results of the Lake Mungo discovery require external confirmation through other comparative analyses. Still, one should appreciate that the trend of the past half century has been one of ever-earlier dates for a hominin presence in Sahul. Findings on Rottnest Island, for example, 18 kilometres off Western Australia’s coast near Fremantle, indicate a possible hominin occupation as early as 70,000 years ago. And Jinmium, a sandstone rock shelter in the Northern Territory, has revealed stone artefacts dated through thermoluminescence at over 100,000 years old; this remarkable finding, however, still awaits verification.

All living humans in the region are, as most scholars agree, descendants of Homo sapiens sapiens who more recently came ‘out of Africa’, as particularly modern genetic studies show. However, today’s Aboriginal, Papuan and Melanesian populations as well as some scattered groups in Southeast Asia and the Philippines also share around 4–6 per cent of their genome with Denisova hominins, very recently recognized to be co-members of the Homo genus during the Palaeolithic era (Old Stone Age). The most parsimonious explanation for this is that the earliest migrating populations of Homo sapiens sapiens interbred in Southeast Asia with these other hominins before continuing east and south.

On Luzón, the largest and northernmost island of the Philippines, a French team recently unearthed a hominin foot bone at least 67,000 years old, the earliest date for a hominoid presence on any Southeast Asian island. Bone size suggests that either Homo habilis or Homo floresiensis were present there. This not only confirms the use of very early seafaring technology but also the sophisticated language (gestural and/or oral) which planning for such a voyage requires. These island occupations occurred during the so-called depletion-and-search migrations, whereby small tribes would migrate at the rate of around 50 kilometres per generation. From 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, modern humans ranged out to populate nearly all the Old World (and perhaps the Americas, too, as some scholars are now claiming). Migrating also southwards from Asia down into the Sunda ‘Boot’, they would have crossed the sea similarly in small flotillas of bamboo-log rafts or perhaps dug-out canoes. They made their first traverses towards north via Celebes and the Moluccas to occupy northern Sahul. Others ranged further south, along the detached Lesser Sunda islands of Lombok, Flores, Timor and others to occupy the coastal regions of northwestern Sahul. Coming from both directions, Sahul could be reached only after several successive sea-crossings, some as long as 100 kilometres in distance: that is, beyond visible land.

It appears that these migrants, who existed around 50,000 years ago, were the Aboriginal Australians’ and Papuans’ ultimate ancestors, those true spirits and lawgivers of Dreamtime.

New Guinea, today less than 200 kilometres north of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, was evidently an early centre of Homo sapiens sapiens intrusion when New Guinea still comprised Sahul’s elongated northern appendage. Its great diversity of cultures and large population testify to certainly no less than 50,000 years of uninterrupted human development on the island, Earth’s second largest (after Greenland). Various Highland and Lowland societies speak of their descent from ocean gods or from ancestors who rose up from an underworld; various coastal tribes tell of legendary voyages of settlement. Using Western scientific methods, practitioners of modern archaeology and genetic profiling can confirm prehistoric migration paths, particularly through Sahul’s northern reaches, which were plied tens of thousands of years ago.

The region’s tangible archaeological record is impressive, and continually deepening. We now know, for example, that one northern site on New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula served Archaic Papuans as a long-term shelter as early as 40,000 years ago. The Matenkupkum cave site on New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago, northeast of Papua New Guinea (eastern New Guinea), apparently accommodated a small community around 33,000 years ago. Five thousand years later, other Archaic Papuans called a site on Buka Island in the northern Solomon Islands, south of the Bismarcks, their home. By about 25,000 years ago, Near Oceania – that is, New Guinea, the Bismarcks (comprising the Admiralties, New Britain and New Ireland) and the Solomons – could certainly have held hundreds of discrete Archaic Papuan communities.

These Archaic Papuans, who are sometimes called Australoids, were preoccupied with various methods of food acquisition. In the New Guinea Highlands, at ancient sites such as Kosipe, local Papuan communities primarily comprised hunter–gatherers. Occupants of lowland settlements engaged in both hunting–gathering and marine-life activities. But marine pursuits, including shellfish and urchin gathering, dominated the lives of coastal Papuans in the shoreline settlements of New Britain, New Ireland and Bougainville in the Solomons. Changing domiciles often in search of new habitats, Archaic Papuans were a migrant people who seem to have seldom shied from close sea-crossings.

With such movements and differentiated settlement patterns, networks of exchange increased and diversified. Some archaeologists hold that obsidian (volcanic glass) from New Britain’s Talasea site made its way to a number of further sites within the Bismarck Archipelago as early as 20,000 years ago; the trade continued for thousands of years. Having adapted to a variety of local coastal and inland environments, the First Islanders were already benefiting from established societies that evidently practised sophisticated techniques of exchange involving repeated sea-crossings.

New Guinea’s earliest stone tools – hoe-like waisted blades and flaked axe-adzes – suggest that forest-edge clearance was taking place. It has been hypothesized that this Palaeolithic population was already practising a rudimentary form of horticulture, that is cultivating simple crop gardens. If true, then New Guinea’s Archaic Papuans would have been among the world’s first crop gardeners (in contrast to the hunting– gathering practised everywhere else on Earth during the Palaeolithic era). However, the required evidence to confirm the hypothesis, such as drainage ditches and measurable pollen changes, has not been forthcoming. It is believed that New Guinea’s earliest assemblage of flaked-stone tools – a mainstay of comparative archaeology – reveals features characteristic of the occupations of both Palaeolithic Australia (Sahul) and Southeast Asia.

However, external connections of lineage and trade began gradually to decline around 12,000 years ago. Sea levels started rising as kilometre-thick sheets of ice which, until then, had covered large parts of Earth melted in warmer mean temperatures that have continued up to the present day. Entire land masses became ‘detached’, one from the other, as waters rose. From a geological perspective, this happened overnight. In human cultural terms, it was an extremely protracted process. Maximum sea levels were not reached until around 8000 years ago, when the neck of land near Cape York, Australia, connecting Sahul to its northern appendage (New Guinea) finally disappeared under what became Torres Strait.

New Guinea had become a separate island, part of Near Oceania. (Near Oceania itself demarcates the distribution of major fauna and flora from those of northern, southern and particularly the eastern islands, all known as Remote Oceania.) Well before 12,000 years ago, Archaic Papuan hunter–gatherers had, it is assumed, occupied the Highland, Lowland and coastal regions of New Guinea, the Bismarcks and the Solomons. As most ancient coastal sites were gradually inundated over the 4000 years of rising sea levels, those sites which had once represented the most densely populated Archaic Papuan settlements now lay underwater. (This explains why discovered Archaic Papuan sites exclusively comprise the erstwhile higher habitats and cave or rock shelters that, back then, had been only sparsely populated; most ancient sites, pending improved technology, are still too deeply submerged to investigate.) New Papuan societies and languages began differentiating under drastically changed geographical and environmental conditions.

ANCIENT NEAR OCEANIA

The outgrowth of these changed conditions, ‘Pacific Islands’ as a human habitat began in New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagos. Near Oceania’s profound human history – far longer than Remote Oceania’s – reveals a vast social diversity and immense cultural variation. Isolated from its Sahul parent continent since the filling of Torres Strait around 8000 years ago, New Guinea houses the world’s richest treasury of languages within one confined geographical area: perhaps over 500 Papuan and Austronesian tongues here and on neighbouring islands, possibly comprising Earth’s third largest language family (Trans-New Guinea). Though one would expect genetic connections with the languages of Australia, whose Aborigines once shared Sahul with their northern neighbours the Archaic Papuans, no reliable systematic correspondence has ever been found (perhaps because of the profound time depth which thwarts the limited capabilities of historical linguistics).

The fact that other Near Oceanian islands reveal a similar extreme of linguistic diversity indicates that these islands, too, were initially settled by the two genetically and linguistically distinct peoples. The continued development and interaction of these diverse cultures produced one of Earth’s most ancient and elaborate cultural complexes.

It is assumed, for want of hard archaeological evidence, that Archaic Papuans had already settled in the southernmost islands of the Solomon Archipelago by the height of the last glaciation, around 18,000 years ago. There is no indication that Papuans proceeded further than this – that is, into Remote Oceania – until shortly before the arrival of Austronesians many thousands of years later. Scholars now believe that it was probably not the greater sea distances (that is, beyond visible landfall) between islands and archipelagos, which prevented Papuans from extensively settling in Remote Oceania. The reluctance to do this was probably attributable instead to the paucity of naturally occurring fauna and flora in Remote Oceania to provide long-term sustenance after arrival. Such natural resources prevailed only in Near Oceania. Throughout Near Oceania – from the northwest Admiralties to the southeast Solomons – Papuans had adapted to various environments. They established sophisticated networks of exchange and rapidly grew in numbers, with accelerating complexity and further differentiation.

Nothing has disrupted the Papuan continuum up to the present day.

Early Papuan sea-crossings were hardly the famed open-ocean voyages of those celebrated Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers who came much later. Early voyages probably occurred in bamboo-log rafts or dug-out canoes, with minimum navigational control. Voyages nearly always took place between nearby shorelines, and comprised ‘hopping’ from one visible island to the next. Papuan mariners clearly relied on the time-honoured principle of the shortest crossing. The crucial factor in such early crossings was time: the danger of a raft or canoe becoming waterlogged – and as a result its occupants drowning – was always present. As a minimum of 25 couples was needed with the first settlement in order to avoid human extinction within two or three generations of arrival on a previously uninhabited island, early sea-crossings could not have been accidental. They were clearly intentional. But why did Archaic Papuans, time after time, drift away on tiny rafts or canoes to distant, hazy islands on the horizon? It was evidently their way of experiencing the world. Archaic Papuans, too, had no other motive in mind but to search out new habitats, exploit the exploitable and thrive where possible. It was the very purpose of life and offered continued survival.

The First Islanders were hunter–gatherers and fishermen, then, who possessed intricate strategies that transcended mere subsistence. Before the end of the last Ice Age, Archaic Papuans were even introducing mammals to New Ireland in the offshore Bismarcks. The best-defined archaeological sequence of early human presence in the region comes from New Guinea’s Highlands. By around 15,000 years ago, the Kaironk Valley had become home to hunter–gatherers. However, actual Highland regions were occupied only once Ice Age glaciers had receded globally (no glaciers were ever in New Guinea itself). Before then, coastal regions, warmed by ocean currents, had been preferred habitats. The rock shelters at Kafiavana and Kiowa in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea accommodated hunter–gatherers over 10,000 years ago. One may assume that rising mean temperatures worldwide finally allowed the general settlement of the Highlands at about this period, as evidenced by pollen changes over the following millennia, indicating forest clearance.

At this time in Near Oceania, Archaic Papuans lived in villages of some 30 individuals who often relocated to other sites. Networks of exchange remained internal within a given archipelago. Ocean gaps did not link but divided the First Islanders, who in this way continued to differentiate culturally. Rising sea levels and mean temperatures enabled crop cultivation in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. There is convincing evidence of the earliest ditch and drainage systems, such as those at the swamp margins of Kuk in the Mount Hagen region. Taro was apparently cultivated in Kuk’s hollows and gutters from 9000 to 5500 years ago.

Taro had originally come from Southeast Asia. The name taro includes a number of plant species belonging to the Arum family, Araceae. There is evidence that taro was already being used by the northern Solomon Islanders of Buka as early as 28,000 years ago. Purposely cultivated in New Guinea for more than 6000 years, taro is used for its large, starchy rhizomes (root-like stems emitting roots and usually producing leaves). Cultivated taro, Colocasia esculenta, was to become a staple food crop throughout Pacific Islands. It is still popular today.

Bismarck sites of similar antiquity reveal plantings of Canarium indicum, an almond and tree crop probably brought from New Guinea. It appears that Archaic Papuans, at that time also, intentionally introduced such wild fauna as large rats and bandicoots (insect-eating Sahul marsupials) to Manus Island in the Admiralties and rats and possums to New Ireland in the Bismarcks. (Later migrants introduced the small wallaby as well.) However, no obsidian or animal was taken by Papuans to the Solomons, however, suggesting infrequent contact with the southernmost archipelago of Near Oceania.

In the Eastern Highlands, agriculture developed at a slower pace. Here, hunting–gathering still prevailed and the kudzu plant (Pueraria lobata) – not taro – was cultivated.

One assumes that other crops, which later formed the basis of Pacific Islands horticulture and agriculture, such as certain species of bananas and sugarcane, were also cultivated at a relatively early date in New Guinea.

The fact that New Guinea Highlanders engaged in frequent exchanges with coastal regi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The First Islanders
• 2. Melanesians, Micronesians, Polynesians
• 3. The European Trespass
• 4. The Second Colonization
• 5. New Pacific Identities
• 6. Pacific Islanders in Transit
• 7. Reinventing Pacific Islands
• 8. The ‘New Pacific’
• Selected Further Reading
• Index