Space and Place in an Ocean of Islands: Thoughts on the Attitudes of the Lapita People Towards Islands and Their Colonization

The colonization of the western Pacific Islands around 3000 years ago by neolithic groups known as the Lapita people was an extraordinary achievement. It has long been assumed that the colonisation process was driven by international inter-island voyages involving large numbers of pioneer settlers and all the plants and animals they needed to establish a broad marine and horticulture based lifestyle on the uninhabited islands they expected to find. This paper suggests that at least some of these groups may not have been tethered to the island but were 'sea nomads' who chose to spend most of their time on boats rather than on land. The stimulas for this idea came from geoarchaeological research on the Lapita settlement on Qoqo Island, southwest Viti Levu Island, Fiji, where traces of large numbers of Lapita people are found on what was a short narrow tombolo at the time of the island's colonisation, about 1000 BC.