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The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their distinct material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The Lapita people are believed to have originated from the northern Philippines , either directly, via the Mariana Islands , or both. [ 3 ]
Teouma is a major archaeological site 800 m (2,625 ft) from Teouma Bay on the island of Éfaté in Vanuatu.The site contains the oldest known cemetery within the Pacific Islands, and has been important in the gathering of information relating to the Lapita people of the ninth and tenth centuries BC.
Around 2850 BP, the Lapita people reached Tonga, and carbon dating places their landfall first in Tongatapu and then in Haʻapai soon after. [3] The newcomers were already well adapted to the resource-scarce island life and settled in small communities of a few households [3] on beaches just above high tide line that faced open lagoons or reefs.
Some of the oldest sites pertaining to the first occupants of the Tongan Islands are found on Tongatapu which is also where the first Lapita ceramics were found by WC McKern in 1921. [6] Nonetheless, reaching the Tongan islands (without Western navigational tools and techniques) was a remarkable feat accomplished by the Lapita peoples.
This culture, known as Lapita, stands out in the Melanesian archeological record, with its large permanent villages on beach terraces along the coasts. Particularly characteristic of the Lapita culture is the making of pottery, including a great many vessels of varied shapes, some distinguished by fine patterns and motifs pressed into the clay.
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Obsidian transported from New Guinea was found with the earliest New Caledonian Lapita pottery. In addition, some researchers have claimed there is evidence of New Caledonian human habitation dating from 3000 BC (predating Lapita culture by 1500 years), while others claim to have found pre-Lapita pottery. [13]
He theorized that it was kept by the Lapita settlers as a talisman, a reminder of where they had come from. Fiji Television reported on 20 March 2006 that an ancient Fijian village, believed to have been occupied by chiefs sometime between 1250 and 1560, had been discovered at Kuku , in Nausori .