A pottery style that marks a migration
The Lapita culture is identified above all by its pottery. Fragments of finely decorated, hand-built ceramics turn up in sites from the Bismarck Archipelago, north of New Guinea, eastwards to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. The range covers around 4,000 kilometres, which is remarkable for a people who left no written records. Radiocarbon dating places its beginning in the Bismarcks at roughly 3,300 years ago, around the 14th century BCE, and its spread into the islands beyond over the following few centuries.
The name comes from a site on the Foue Peninsula in New Caledonia, where pottery of this kind was excavated in 1952. Lapita is better understood as a cluster of related features, sometimes called the Lapita cultural complex, than as one unified nation. The same decorated ware appears with similar houses, tools and food practices, but local communities clearly differed.
What Lapita pottery looks like
The most distinctive pieces are decorated with patterns made by pressing a toothed tool, similar to a small comb, into the wet clay. The impressions are arranged into bands of geometric designs: zigzags, triangles, scrolls and repeated motifs. Some designs have been interpreted as stylised faces or human figures, though how far that reading holds is debated. Not every Lapita pot is decorated, and plain vessels are found in the same sites.
The pots were shaped by hand, built up and smoothed without a potters wheel, and fired at relatively low temperatures in open fires. Forms include round-bottomed bowls, jars with restricted necks, and pedestalled vessels. Their small size and fine finish suggest that at least the decorated ones may have been special-purpose items, perhaps for serving food or for use in ceremonies, although this is an inference.
Tracking pottery across the ocean
Archaeologists study changes in pottery style in a way that parallels pottery seriation elsewhere in the world: by comparing decoration, shape and temper across sites and checking the sequence against dating. In Lapita’s case, the earliest and most elaborate designs, in the Bismarcks, are followed by simpler versions as people moved east. By the time communities reached Tonga and Samoa around 2,800 years ago, decoration had become much less elaborate, and over the next centuries pottery in western Polynesia was reduced to plain ware before it disappeared from use.
The reasons for this decline are not agreed. Possible explanations include a shortage of suitable clay on some islands, a shift in the ways people cooked and served food, and changes in the social meaning of decorated objects. Because pottery stops, the tools of archaeology change after Lapita, which makes the later phases harder to follow.
Clues beyond pottery
Pottery is only one part of the Lapita evidence. Sites contain:
- Obsidian. Volcanic glass from sources in the Bismarcks, such as New Britain, has been found at sites hundreds and in some cases well over a thousand kilometres away. This points to exchange networks and repeated contact between islands.
- Shell tools and ornaments. Adzes, fishhooks and beads made from marine shell show a close dependence on the sea.
- Domestic animals and crops. Remains of pigs, dogs and chickens, along with evidence for root crops and tree crops, show that voyagers carried a farming toolkit with them.
- Houses. Postholes at coastal sites suggest dwellings built on stilts over lagoons or beaches, though this pattern is not uniform.
The diet combined cultivated plants and animals with fish, shellfish and birds. On islands that had never been inhabited, early settlers often found birds and other fauna that had no experience of people, and some of these species declined or vanished soon after arrival.
Who were the Lapita people?
Studies of ancient DNA from early burials, including a cemetery at Teouma in Vanuatu and a burial from Tonga, have shown that the first settlers of Remote Oceania carried ancestry linked to East Asia and the Austronesian expansion, with little of the Papuan-related ancestry found in the region today. That Papuan-related ancestry seems to have increased in Vanuatu and some neighbouring islands in later centuries. These findings do not by themselves explain language or culture, and researchers continue to work out the pattern of mixing.
Linguistic evidence is also relevant: Lapita is usually associated with the speakers of early Oceanic languages, the ancestors of many of today’s Pacific languages. The link between pottery, genes and language is probable but should not be treated as automatic.
Why Lapita matters
Before Lapita, people had lived in Near Oceania for tens of thousands of years but had not gone on to the more remote groups. The Lapita expansion crossed gaps of open sea that were sometimes hundreds of kilometres wide, and it did so in a few centuries. That required effective boats and sailing knowledge, which the later traditions of Polynesian wayfinding and the design of voyaging canoes seem to inherit, although we have almost no physical remains of Lapita-era vessels to show what they looked like.
The expansion also introduced a package of animals and plants to islands that had none of them. In that sense, Lapita voyagers were not just explorers but founders of new communities and ecosystems. The wider story of what followed, as people moved on to the east, is told in the account of Pacific settlement, and it is a good example of how a single type of object can help reconstruct a movement of people when other records are missing.