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Decay characteristics of the eastern Lapita design system.

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Abstract

We examine the Lapita colonization of east Fiji from the frequency of pottery designs. The design frequency analysis suggests that east Fiji was settled by Lapita groups emanating from west Fiji and Tonga, and long-distance interaction with archipelagos to the west of Fiji was inconsequential during the terminal Lapita phase when east Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were colonized. The results have important implications for understanding Lapita colonization elsewhere, particularly the extent to which migrant communities interacted and expressed identity in the varied physical and social environments encountered during dispersal.

Keywords: Lapita, decorative system, design decay, Pacific

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A fundamental issue in colonization research is the timing of prehistoric human arrival and the rate and direction of expansion in new landscapes, because these parameters anchor environmental and cultural sequences and elucidate the colonization pattern. The two popular ways of visualizing the form of colonization are the wave-of-advance/demic diffusion model and the linear point-and-arrow/streaming model (Rockman 2003). The importance of deducing the colonization pattern is the frequent linkage made between a model and a particular subsistence mode thought to underpin human expansion. In the demic wave-of-advance model, population growth fuelled by agriculture caused related human groups--and their language(s)--to incrementally establish themselves over substantial areas of oceanic and continental territory (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984; Diamond and Bellwood 2003; Fort 2003). Rapid 'point-and-arrow' movements, in comparison, tend to be associated with human dispersal by hunting and foraging wild foods in pristine environments (Beaton 1991; Keegan 1995; Anderson 2003).

There is no necessary connection, though, between subsistence mode and colonization pattern (e.g. Cavalli-Sforza 2002: 80). Wave of advance has been used to model the colonization of Australia (Birdsell in Rockman 2003) and is implicit in the overkill hypothesis of megafaunal extinction by hunter-gathers in the Americas and elsewhere (Whittington and Dyke 1984; Surovell et al. 2005). The spread of Neolithic agriculturalists across Europe has been characterized as a series of punctuated events (Fiedel and Anthony 2003), and in the Pacific, some archipelagoes colonized in Lapita times were believed to be point-and-arrow movements made by putative agriculturalists (Burley and Dickinson 2001; Anderson 2003).

Once the subsistence mode is decoupled from an overarching dispersal pattern, we can put the question of economic stimulus to one side and consider the colonization process at a closer geographic scale. For instance, what are the regional origins of specific colonizing groups. How was local identity expressed in new environments? And what was the frequency and extent of prehistoric interaction among migrants given the unique socio-demographic conditions at destination? While the general outline of a colonization event can be drawn from the dispersal pattern and, controversially, the subsistence mode, archaeological approaches to discriminate the history of specific migrant groups are required to understand the complexity of prehistoric population movements. Stylistic information from ceramics is an excellent source of information to examine the social dimensions of colonization (e.g. Best 2002; Chiu 2005), but methods are required to distinguish between designs brought by migrants to a destination and those representing interaction and local innovation in the course of occupation.

In this paper, we examine change in the eastern Lapita ceramic design system to understand the Lapita colonization of east Fiji. Previous studies comparing the presence/ absence of pottery designs have posited an inter-archipelago divide between west Fiji and east Fiji during the colonization phase, with east Fiji grouping with Tonga and Samoa (Best 1984; Clark and Anderson 2001 a; Burley et al. 2002). But, reanalysis of the presence/absence method indicates it is not sufficiently sensitive to reveal the process of regional colonization, due to rapid decay of the Lapita decorative system soon after the colonization of west Fiji at 3100-3000 cal. BP.

By establishing the frequency rank of pottery designs and applying a model of unbiased transmission, we then examine how the process of stylistic decay influenced design survival. Unbiased transmission results when "no individual is copied preferentially such that the probability a cultural trait is chosen simply depends on how prevalent it is already" (Bentley and Sherman 2003: 479). The unbiased transmission model constitutes a useful hypothesis to evaluate style change in that it holds that the survival of a design over time is correlated with its frequency. Designs that do not behave in this way might well result from interaction and local innovation.

Eastern Lapita design decay

In an early computer study of Lapita pottery designs, Green (1979: 44) identified a western style from the Bismarck Archipelago to Vanuatu-New Caledonia, and an eastern style in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. The Lapita design system was found to be simplified in the east, where the sizeable water-gap (~850 km) separated Fiji--Tonga--Samoa from western islands. In Lapita studies, there are competing views about ceramic design variation and whether it supports geographic or temporal models of expansion (Summerhayes 2000; Sand 2001; Chiu 2003), but here we examine Green's initial observation of design decay using for convenience the regional terms. In Green's (1979: 42, 44) paper the primary cause of style drift and decay is the separation of eastern Lapita communities from the exchange systems of western Lapita. The concept of genetic drift describes the divergence of parent and daughter populations as a result of random sampling error, which leads to change in the relative gene frequencies of the two groups, but is not necessarily accompanied by gene loss. Decay on the other hand refers to the extinction of genetic or cultural variants in a population, and is a likely outcome of drift in small populations (Neiman 1995: Figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In the eastern Lapita region, there are several reasons why rapid stylistic decay might have taken place. First, migration studies suggest migrant volume declines as distance to destination increases (Lang Li 1981: 83; Lee 1996). The number of migrants entering Fiji-West Polynesia was probably less than in western Lapita, where the entire region from the Bismarcks to New Caledonia could be reached by ocean voyages of no more than 350 km. Second, style decay is countered by inter-archipelago interaction which promotes design homogeneity and synchronized changes in pottery style, while the probability of local design innovation is directly proportional to the number of inter-group transmissions within an island or island group (Neiman 1995). In the eastern Lapita region, interaction among relatively small colonizing populations was likely to have been of greater importance than contact with western Lapita groups separated from Fiji-West Polynesia by the large sea gap. In stylistic terms, an expected outcome of eastern Lapita colonization geography, then, is rapid decay of the original design system, which might be partially offset by the effects of local innovation from regional interaction.

The decay component of the eastern Lapita design system has not been quantified, a gap which has implications for identifying the regional colonization pattern and establishing the nature of interaction. These dimensions...

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