Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ]
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.
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.
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.
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.
The direct ancestors of the Polynesians are believed to be the Neolithic Lapita culture. This group emerged in Island Melanesia and Micronesia around 1500 BC from a convergence of Austronesian migration waves, originating from both Island Southeast Asia to the west and an earlier Austronesian migration to Micronesia to the north. The culture ...
It is there that some believed that Tongan culture and its people developed and evolved out of the ancient Austronesian/Lapita culture (c. 1600 BCE - c. 500 BCE) that migrated from the South East Asian islands through Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Micronesia and Fiji in ...
The Lapita culture also came into contact with the non-Austronesian early agriculturists of New Guinea and introduced wetland farming techniques to them. In turn, they assimilated their range of indigenous cultivated fruits and tubers, as well as reacquiring domesticated dogs and pigs, before spreading further eastward to Island Melanesia and ...