Understanding the Place Properly: Palaeogeography of Selected Lapita Sites in the Western Tropical Pacific Islands and its Implications

The island groups of the western tropical Pacific include both large high islands with often continental affinities, such as are found widely in Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Solomon Islands, and smaller lower islands of wholly oceanic origin, such as most in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. Within the Holocene (last 10,000 years), these islands experienced the effects of sea level changes of tens of metres, changes that have not proved easy to isolate because of both the tectonic instability of many parts of the region and the spatially-variable pattern of Holocene sea level change (Dickinson 2001, Nunn 1994). In particular, there was once considerable debate (reviewed by Nunn 1995) as to whether or not this region experienced a higher-than-present sea level during the mid-Holocene. It is now accepted that it did so, with sea level in the western low-latitude Pacific having attained a maximum of perhaps 2.1 m around 4200 cal yr B.P. (Grossman, Fletcher and Richmond 1998, Nunn and Peltier 2001).