Are islands insular? Landscape vs. seascape in the case of the Arawe Islands, Papua New Guinea

ArchaeoL Oceania 29 (1994) 162-171

Are islands insular? Landscape vs. seascape in the case

of the Arawe Islands, Papua New Guinea

CHRIS GOSDEN and CHRISTINA PAVLIDES

Abstract

The predominant view of Pacific prehistory holds that the Pacific islands were isolated in most periods and that isolation is the key to their development. We question the development-in- isolation model and present data from the Arawe Islands, West New Britain to show that, although close to large land masses, the sea has linked these islands into a wider world in the late prehistoric period. We present ethnohistorical data on settlement, subsistence and trade which shows the nature of these links and discuss how far sea links have affected the use of the land. If the way in which land is used is partly determined by the sea, we should think in terms of seascape, as well as landscape, extending the range of the latter term. We argue further that the key feature of all periods of Pacific prehistory is connectivity by sea and that in the process of colonisation, not only were par- ticular sailing strategies employed but also social strategies designed to connect up large regions. This is true both of the area covered by the Lapita distribution and of eastern Polynesia.

We know that no man or woman is an island, but what of islands themselves? This article tackles anew the old question of whether the sea is a bridge or a barrier and comes out firmly in favour of the former view when we are looking at the history of the western Pacific. It seems ironic that in an issue of this journal dedicated to landscape we should emphasise the importance of the sea. However, the whole notion of landscape raises a series of issues when applied to the island Pacific which do not arise when looking at continents. The major of these is the assumption that land is isolated when surrounded by sea. The land is seen as the major source of food, raw materials and locus of settlement, it is where production takes place and exchanges arranged and carried out. In short, land is seen as home. By contrast, the sea is seen as a foreign and threatening medium dividing one piece of land from another, which people cross at their peril, grateful to make land again.

Thought on the isolated nature of Pacific islands is in an interesting state at present and a short review of the concept of isolation is necessary in order to understand the former utility of the notion of isolation and how it may now be usefully replaced with other ideas. For many years, one of the dominant approaches in the Pacific has

CG: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 3PP, England; CP: Department of Archaeology, La Trobe University, Bundoora Victoria 3083.

been to see Pacific societies as the prime example of adaptive radiation and this idea has been applied particularly to Polynesian society. Goodenough (1957) saw that island groups in the remote Pacific formed inbreed- ing isolates, all of which are known to derive from a single ancestral population. Goodenough (1957:149) followed Sharp (1956) in downplaying the sailing capabilities of Pacific mariners and felt that the settlement of the Pacific had been slow and accidental. If Pacific peoples' sailing capabilities were not great it was easy to see how islands could remain isolated. This model has been most recently and clearly restated by Kirch and Green (1987). In their view, Polynesian cultures can all be traced back to a single ancestor: those of eastern Polynesia can be linked to archaic east Polynesian culture and this has its origins in Ancestral Polynesian Society in western Polynesia, which has as its archaeological manifestation Lapita assem- blages. These derive ultimately from southeast Asia. The programme for Pacific archaeology is to chart the adaptive radiation of Polynesian groups under varying environ- mental and social conditions, seeing how far they have diverged from Ancestral Polynesian society. 'Among the mechanisms of divergence, which we can recognise in Polynesia, the most fundamental is isolation, the key factor which renders oceanic islands ideal theaters for phylogenetic studies' (Kirch and Green 1987:440). This emphasis on isolation is slightly tempered later in the article through the acknowledgment that few islands were ever totally isolated, but were linked together through exchange networks (Kirch and Green 1987:442).

We can see that the stress on isolation as the key to divergence has had a long and fruitful history in the Pacific, allowing people to probe how diversity developed out of initial unity. Recently, however, there have been notes of dissent from the idea that isolation has been the key to divergence. Terrell (1986:chap 6) questions any absolute concept of isolation, pointing out that it is not merely physical distance that cuts communities off and that communities can become relatively isolated within a dense set of connections, making the general point that we need an idea of the processes by which connections are maintained or broken. It is Irwin (1992), however, who has put a major nail in the coffin of the isolation thesis. In its early days, at least, the idea that Pacific islands were laboratories for understanding divergence was linked to the notion that first colonization was accidental and that

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few links were subsequently maintained across the sea. To summarise Irwin's argument drastically, he has shown that the whole area from the end of the Solomon Islands out to the furthest points of the Polynesian triangle could have been colonised through a single, developing and purposive strategy of colonisation. Pacific people were in control of their movements and through a combination of astronomical navigation and building up a map of the Pacific were able to deliberately explore and then colonise all areas of this enormous ocean. Colonisation also involved continued interaction over large areas and long time periods: the Lapita 'interaction sphere' is well known and this is being complemented by growing evidence of a similar large area of interaction in east Polynesia (see Irwin 1992:73-4 and the references cited there). Increased evidence of interaction has come from many recent provenancing studies showing movement of materials of all kinds in all areas of the Pacific. In a major review of the prehistoric production and movement of polished stone artefacts Leach (1993) concludes that large adzes and the social and economic structures that produced them are relatively late developments in Polynesian prehistory and that the fashion was spread through central Polynesia through later voyages and contacts. She concludes her article with the statement that 'Accepting this proposition, however, further erodes the development-in-isolation model which has underpinned the orthodox account of Polynesian cultural evolution for several decades' (Leach 1993:41).

One response to these criticisms has been to moderate claims for isolation and to admit that although island communities were separate that they were linked by trade, which set up external contacts between otherwise insular societies (Kirch 1988, 1990). However, what we are attempting to do here is to use the criticisms of the isolation model to open up a broader range of possibilities and this can be done through taking some of the theoreti- cal points deriving from the literature on landscape. One of the reasons that people have recently been interested in landscape is that space and society are mutually constitu- tive (see introduction to this volume). Social forms are made up of what can be seen as a series of communicative media: language, material culture, kinship structures and so on. The different spaces inhabited by people will create varying types of connections of communication. Language, material culture and kinship will change as the spaces people inhabit change; a point especially important to bear in mind in a situation of colonisation. But space is not an absolute and is shaped by the links and divisions that are made between human groups through the deployment of language, kinship and material culture. Space and society are interdependent and indivisible terms and we need to think more about how one helps create the other, a point Terrell (1986) made, as mentioned above. The demise of the development-in- isolation model does not mean we should simply replace it with its opposite and say that the key to Pacific societies is that they were in contact over vast distances all the time. Rather it allows us to rethink the relations between

land and sea and to see these relations as historically produced.

It is the changing relations of land and sea that we want to pursue in a limited case study in this article and we will come back to the broader implications of these ideas at the end. We attempt to show that island communities are not necessarily internal worlds related through external connections, but that the sea can create a greater sense of community in which the whole is quite different to the sum of its parts. Our case study is drawn from the Arawe Islands, West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, where we have been working since 1985.

The changing spatial context of the Arawe Islands

The Arawe Islands would seem initially to be unpromising ground to look at the influence of the sea. They are a large number of islands very close to the continental island of New Britain. They are certainly not isolated in the way that the oceanic islands of the remote Pacific are. But even with this potential for emphasis on the land, we shall see that there are a series of maritime traditions in the Arawes that have made the sea vital in understanding their history over the last 3500 years.

The Arawe island group is made up of around forty islands, six of which are permanently inhabited (Fig. 1). They are located 149° east and 6° 30' south. The islands are small: the largest is less than five square kilometres and many are less than one square kilometre. Archaeo- logical work has been carried out in the group since 1985, as part of a larger project integrating with work on obsidian quarrying on the north coast of West New Britain undertaken by Specht, Fullagar and Torrence (Specht et al. 1988) and with Specht's research into sites in the Kandrian area (Specht, Lilley and Normu 1981). Much of this work is archaeological; however we have gathered data on kinship, trade, settlement and landuse over the last century or more, following a series of interests laid out in Gosden (1989). These data and their implications are presented here for the first time.

One of us (Pavlides 1988) has documented the exchange links between the Arawes and surrounding areas in the present and the broader project in the Arawes has produced data on how exchange has changed over the last 100 years or more. The exchange system within which the Arawe Islands sit (Fig. 2) has been well documented in both past and present, but usually from the perspective of the Siassi Islands and other areas to the west (Harding 1967, Lilley 1988). No one doubts that the Siassi system of trade and life was dependent on the sea. The small islands south of Umboi Island were too densely inhabited for the population to be supported by food produced on the islands. The Siassis thus specialised in trade in order to live. As such they form part of a group of specialist or subsistence traders found elsewhere in coastal Papua New Guinea (Allen 1984). We are not claiming that the Arawe Islanders ought to be included within this group. But we do feel that an engagement with the coastal trading

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Figure 1. The Arawe Islands showing present villages and hamlets from the late prehistoric period.

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systems of the area ran through all aspects of Arawes life in the recent and remote past.

The present engagement with trade in the Arawes has a clear geographical structure to it. The main connec

tions are not with areas immediately adjacent to the islands themselves, but are at some remove from them. The total extent of the Arawes trade and exchange contacts is about 300 km, with strong connections to the

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Figure 2. The area encompassed by trading system in which the Arawe Islanders were involved in the recent period.

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Kandrian region to the east, continuing as far as Gasmata in more attenuated form and to the Siassi Islands in the west (Fig. 2). In some ways the Arawes can be seen as the point of junction between the Vitiaz Strait system and the trading systems of the south coast of West New Britain. The Siassi themselves usually venture no further than the Arawes, although material such as carved wooden bowls deriving from Siassi are found as far east as Gasmata, taken to this eastward destination by Arawe people. The major links the Arawes have are all coastal and the sea is the most important creator of links. While people in the Kandrian and Gasmata areas do share a similar language with people in the Arawes, those in Siassi do not (Chown- ing 1969:29-30, Pavlides 1988, Fig. 18). Trade cannot be said to follow similarities in language directly.

All the main links in trade that the Arawe people have are coastal. People travel in speed boats in the present, but in the past sailed in double mast canoes obtained from the Siassis (Harding 1967:133). There are two non-coastal exceptions, areas inland with which regular trade links are kept up. The first of these is the village of Urin, from which bark cloth belts (called malu in Tok Pisiri) are obtained. However, Urin lies on the Pulie river, just east of the Arawes, which can be easily navigated by canoes and speed boats as far as Urin and beyond. The second area is Kaulong, inland from Kandrian, the source of power

stones known as mok mok or singa depending on the size of the stone (the latter is larger than the former). These stones, which may be prehistoric in origin, are found generally in the Kaulong area, although Todd (1934a:93) notes that they are mainly found in the vicinity of the Alimbit river. Mok mok and singa are flat circular stones with a hole bored in the middle and are a vital element in all bride prices (see below), as well as being used for sorcery (Todd 1935:426). The Kaulong connection is thus due to a specific set of items, which people seem not to be able to obtain elsewhere and which are vital to marriage transactions. Furthermore, it is uncertain how much trade is carried on with Kaulong people direct and how far mok mok and singa are obtained through intermediaries in the islands offshore from Kandrian.

Overland trade routes crossing the interior of New Britain did exist and the 'road* from Kaliai on the north coast down to the south coast village of Sara seems to have been the most important as far as Arawes people are concerned (Gosden together with R. Fullagar and J. Kaye walked part of this route in 1987 to collect data on the amount and nature of past trade). This trade operated into this century and is still of limited importance. However, two points need to be made. First, the major items which traveled along this route (obsidian, stone axes, and tambu shell currency) also travelled round the

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coast from the Talasea peninsula. There is no indication that the more direct overland route was of greater importance. Also, it seems that people from the Arawes rarely, if ever, traveled this route themselves and obtained obsidian, axes and shell through silent trade with people living on the coast. The existence, but relative unim- portance, of overland trade as far as the Arawes were concerned strengthens the notion that seaborne trade predominated.

The importance of the sea as a medium of connection is strengthened when we look at the types of items traded. These are listed in Table 1, together with their major source areas. Of them many of the most important derive from Siassi either because they were produced there (wooden bowls, dog's tooth bags and headbands, shell armbands) or because they were gained in trade with the Siassis (Sio and Madang pottery today and Talasea obsidian, in former days). Most of the items which are most important in ceremonies were obtained from and via Siassi. The major exceptions are the mok mok stones from the Kaulong area, as mentioned above and tambu from the north coast of New Britain or from New Ireland. The major items of ceremonial importance deriving from the Arawe region are the gold lip shells, found on the extensive reefs and sea grass beds of the area.

Table 1. Items moving in Arawes trade and exchange.

Solong or Tok Pisin term English Source(s)

Mok mok/singa Power stone Kaulong area Willing Dog's tooth bag Siassi/Arawe Yagrong Boar's tusks General Nienienko Dog's tooth headbands Siassi/Arawe Eklung Gold lip shells Arawe Etel, dawali, luga Tambu - shell money Kove, New Ireland Elep Carved bowl Siassi Kiru Pottery Madang, Sio Kundu Drum Siassi, Arawe Koko Baskets Cape Gloucester Karoka Pandanus mats Arawe Lalai Shell armbands Siassi Malu Bark belts Urin village Ayee Obsidian Talasea

The local importance of traded materials can be seen from the composition of a typical bride price (as can be seen from the 1990 bride price shown in Table 2 - the historical dimension of this table will be discussed below). There are a number of rites of passage in Arawe life, of which marriage is one. These include birth, circumcision for boys and various initiation rights for girls, marriage and a variety of death rituals, as well as a whole series of more minor feasts and festivals. All these events involve the same sets of artefacts by and large - tambu and Siassi bowls figure prominently in the more minor celebrations, dogs tooth bags and mok mok are only used in the important rites of passage. Local life in the Arawes depends on items obtained in exchange and these derive mainly from sea connections.

Table 2. Two marriage payments from Pililo Island in the Arawe Islands. Francis Langa is Meru's grandson

Meru + Rasme 1946 Francis Langa + Felicitus 1990

1 10 fathoms shell money 244 fathoms shell money 40 gold lip shells 149 gold lip shells 1 pair of boar's tusks 4 pairs of boar's tusks 2 dog's tooth head bands 1 1 dog's tooth head bands 1 dog's tooth bag 4 dog's tooth bags I mok mok 8 mok mok II Siassi bowls 31 Siassi bowls

One of the main things that people within the Arawes give in exchange for these items is food and this fact ties exchange in with the use of the landscape on a broader scale. Taro, yam, sweet potatoes and pigs are the main crops traded with the Siassis for wealth items (Pavlides 1988:38) and Harding (1967:133) notes the number of pigs which were traded for items such as canoes. The planting of crops within the Arawes is thus not just dependent on how much food is needed for supporting people in the local region, but also on the wider needs in exchange. Food is not only moved around in the longer distance exchanges with Siassi and elsewhere, but is exchanged locally on a casual and informal basis. An individual family may plant garden areas specifically to fulfill their requirements in ceremonial exchange and here taro is the favoured crop for ceremonial purposes. Part of the larger Arawes project has been concerned to map garden land and the crops grown so as to give insight into the demands through exchange and this will be reported on elsewhere. The size of garden land cleared and planted, the combination of crops planted and the timing of planting and harvest are all dependent in part on the demands of the exchange system. The whole layout and use of the Arawes landscape is predicated upon the demands of the wider system created by maritime contacts. The land responds to the demands of the sea.

Historical changes in trade

The demands of both land and sea are not static and have changed dramatically over the past century. The changes are complex, but a major area of change has been in the agricultural sphere. There is considerable evidence that food production has expanded hugely in the last century, both in terms of the land used and the productivity per unit area. Garden land today is controlled by individual clans, which come together for the larger work of clearing and setting up a garden. Extended family units carry out planting and harvesting. In the present, there are four islands with large villages on them totaling over one thousand people in all. Each of the forty islands within the Arawes is used for gardens, pig keeping and coconuts. In addition, the three islands with the largest populations, Pililo, Kumbun and Maklo have garden land on the 'main- land' of West New Britain. Much of this land is newly acquired and some at least has been bought for money,

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marking a break with the more usual system whereby access to land is gained through ties of blood or marriage. Part of the reason for the pressure on land is due to a sharply rising population, which is making the islands over-crowded and may soon cause new villages to set up near the recently purchased garden land. However, population pressure is by no means the whole story and innovations due to European contact have also caused changes in gardening practice.

An important area to be considered is technology. Metal tools were brought into the area by traders and labour recruiters from the late nineteenth century onwards. A major leap in people's access to metal items came about the turn of the century when the first plantation was set up in the Arawes by the Forsayth family. This caused regular supplies to come in from Rabaul. The first ethnographic account we have of the area was made by an American ethnographer, A. B. Lewis, in 1909. By this period he notes some use of metal axes instead of stone ones, in gardening and although knives were known in the area, much of the household technology was still based around traditional items, such as shell, obsidian, pots, wood and fibres. It seems likely that the new metal tools were introduced earliest to help male tasks, such as clearing areas for gardens, and the technology women used changed later. The Second World War caused a major in- flux of knives, razors and glass, which saw the end of the use of obsidian and a sharp reduction in the use of shell for scraping and cutting. Metal axes and bush knives for clearing rainforest for gardens made it much easier to set up new gardens, with the result that larger areas could now be cultivated. New strains of pig and chicken were introduced, at least from the start of the Australian administration in 1914. Much more important was the introduction of new root crops, such as cassava, the so- called 'Hong Kong' taro, new varieties of banana and so on. A most interesting aspect of this process is the introduction of sweet potato, which had arrived in Papua New Guinea several centuries ago at least, but which does not seem to have been cultivated until this century in the Arawes. Sweet potato is now second only to taro as a staple, but people are adamant that it only arrived in the area between the two wars. Tree cropping has seen less innovation, although introduced fruit such as mango and pawpaw are now grown in a small way. More important has been the relaxation of restrictions on the coconut, which we know from excavations has been present in the area for at least 3500 years, but which was grown on only one island, according to all accounts, until this century. At this period coconuts were important trade items and were broken before being exchanged so that they could not be replanted. Taken together the innovations in the subsistence sphere have been considerable and the new large and productive gardens have had a major impact on the trade sphere.

Many different effects have worked themselves out on the larger trade system joining the north coast of Papua New Guinea and West New Britain over the last 100 years. Looked at as a whole the system has contracted, with

groups such as the Bili Bili and the Tami Islanders who were active traders in the late nineteenth century giving up this activity early in this century. Harding (1967:191-5) attributes this change to the influence of the Lutheran mission on Tami Island and land acquisition by the German government and planters in the area today known as Finschhafen. Fortunately for both the Siassis and the Arawe Islanders missionisation was late. Missions were established on Umboi from the late nineteenth century onwards, but the first mission on the south coast of New Britain was that of the Catholic Mission on Pililo Island in 1936. The plantation economy also did not cause too great a disruption, because these areas were far from centres of colonial power found in Rabaul and Finsch- hafen. The net effect of western influence in Siassi and the Arawes has been an expansion in the frequency of trade, although the geographical scope of the system has declined. Although our data are somewhat unclear it also appears that the Arawes had far closer ties with the Kilenge area and the north coast of New Britain (Fig. 2) earlier this century than they do today. A major con- tributing factor has been the cessation of warfare with the imposition of Pax Germanica after 1884, which was extended when Australian government patrols moved through the area after 1914.

However, a less noted influence on trade has been the extension of the farming system, discussed above and this is certain to have been more influential in the Arawes than in Siassi, due to the food that the Arawe Islanders channel into the trading system. Because food is the basis of their bargaining power, the more food people could put into the system the more trade they could engage in. The expansion in trade can be exemplified through comparing the two bride prices shown in Table 2. They are separated by over forty years and show at least a three or fourfold increase in the number of items obtained in trade. According to our informants this rate of increase is typical in all forms of transaction and people are worried about the inflationary spiral they are in at present. The causes of this inflation are complex and factors such as wage labour must be taken into account. However, monetary income can only have an indirect effect on exchange as it is rare for the major wealth items to be transacted for money. Also, in recent years the possibility of waged employment has decreased and this has done little to affect the increase in ceremonial payments of all kinds.

A further change which went along with innovations in subsistence is a shift in settlement patterns. Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the present one there was an overall shift in settlement pattern from small defended hamlets each centred around a men's house to the large villages of the present day which combine a number of previously separate hamlets (Fig. 1). The moves are complex and to do with both the political ascendancy of different island groups within the Arawes and the cessation of warfare. However, such changes are also intimately tied to changes in subsistence. The situation at the end of the last century is difficult to reconstruct in any detail from present day oral history, but

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the basic pattern seems to have been of a series of small and relatively impermanent hamlets, which had small areas of gardens attached. Both gardens and habitations moved regularly, as was the situation in the interior of West New Britain until recently. From the evidence of archaeology this system of settlement was set up about 1000 years ago (Gosden and Webb 1994:48-9). Without too much exaggeration we can say that stable villages and full blown agriculture developed for the first time in the Arawes 100 years ago with the introduction of outside crops and technology. These changes shifted the balance between land and sea, in that the land became much more a point of concentration for Arawes people, although still articulated to the ritual and exchange system created through sea connections.

As to the history of the trading and ritual system, we know from oral history that the sea connections pre-date the imposition of the German colonial regime in the 1884. Genealogies we have gathered indicate kinship connections with all the major areas with which trade connections are maintained today going back to early last century at least. Also people's accounts confirm that both the Siassis and the Tami Islanders visited the Arawes on a relatively regular basis and that contacts with Kilenge were important. Furthermore the existence of Sio/Gitua and Astrolabe Bay pots in excavations dating to the last few hundred years, plus obsidian from the Talasea area of north coast of New Britain (Summerhayes et al 1993) are a direct indicator of trade (Fig. 2). These data on the antiquity of trade fit in with Lilley's conclusions from Siassi itself, where he sees the present day Siassi trading system as having an antiquity of some 350 years, with possible connections across the Vitiaz Strait between Siassi and Sio dating back over 1000 years (Lilley 1986: Chap. 11, Lilley 1988).

As far as we can reconstruct, there has been little change in the major items traded over the last century, although the amounts in which they change hands may have increased dramatically. Whilst obsidian and stone axes dropped out of the repertoires, pottery, wooden bowls, shells, shell money, dogs' tooth ornaments and ceremonial stone objects have all remained as items of trade. The stability in traded items is connected with the continuity in ritual and rites of passage. Information from oral histories indicates that all of the main ceremonies practiced today have a long history stretching back beyond the last 150 years. Whilst there have been individual dances bought and sold from and to neighbour- ing groups such as the Siassis (Todd 1934b:203), the overall structure of ceremonial life has remained the same. Ritual, exchange and marriage have changed with the impact of colonialism, but this has been to a far lesser extent than in areas of life such as food production. Gardening has seen a huge rise in productivity, but this has brought no change in kind to the spheres of ritual and exchange. Here there has been tremendous conservatism in the areas with which exchange has been conducted, the sorts of items exchanged and the rituals in which exchanged items play a major role. It may well be that the

overall structure of contact between people along the south coast of New Britain together with areas to the west, and the ritual life connected with it, has helped negotiate the changes brought about by colonialism.

Archaeological evidence

Let us now follow the history of Arawe life back to the Lapita period, which is as far as we can trace it on current archaeological evidence (Gosden and Webb 1994 give a summary account of the evidence from Lapita and later periods). Lapita sites are found from Manus in Papua New Guinea out to Tonga and Samoa in the east and are characterised by similar forms of pottery, worked shell and stone (including obsidian and polished axes) together with a range of other portable artefacts, plus animals such as the pig, dog and chicken. There is much debate about the nature of the Lapita phenomenon. The element we focus on here is the nature and degree of connectivity throughout the area of Lapita's distribution. Kirch (1988, 1990) has put forward the view that Lapita sites represent villages which were linked together through exchange in a manner that is similar to present day systems of trade, albeit on a large spatial scale. Exchange and trade are also seen to create social standing and prestige and maintain forms of hierarchy in what Kirch (1984:chap. 3) sees as Ancestral Polynesian Society.

We want to briefly explore a different possibility, which is that in the Lapita period people were not orientated to the land but to the sea. Lapita distributions do not represent a series of land based communities linked by exchange. Rather the Lapita phenomenon may provide evidence of one super-community of immense scope stretching from island Papua New Guinea out to Tonga and Samoa and this was made a community through continual sea movements. Our reasons for putting forward this idea come from the archaeological data in which it seems that the locus of change in material culture is in the whole rather than the parts. During the Lapita period, as noted above, material culture is similar over a huge area and the most striking aspect of this similarity is pottery. From the Bismarck Archipelago to Tonga and Samoa 3500 years ago there was a design suite with marked regularity both in the elements of decoration and their means of layout on the pot (see articles in Spriggs 1990). This suite of designs was combined with a limited set of forms. The most striking aspect of the pottery assem- blages is not simply their widespread nature, but the fact that similarities are maintained through time by contemporary changes in widely spread regions. The initially complex forms of dentate stamping found over 3000 years ago become simpler with the passage of time and eventu- ally give way to incised and applied decorations (see Kirch 1990:121-3). This happens not at single sites but throughout the area from the Bismarck Archipelago to Vanuatu and maybe beyond to Tonga and Samoa. The locus of larger cause within the area resides at the level of the Lapita phenomenon as a whole, with continual contact leading to co-ordinated changes.

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Given the degree of connectivity between different areas, we have to ask the question what sort of social universe are we dealing with and what were the individual social units within that universe. Recent opinion has come round to the idea that many Lapita sites represent large stable villages supported by subsistence agriculture and linked by trade. This view draws implicitly or explicitly on ethnographic analogy. However, as Ambrose (1978) pointed out the forms of connections found in the Lapita period are quite different in scope and nature from any found in the last few hundred years. This then raises the question that perhaps society as a whole was quite different in the Lapita period. One starting point for questioning is to look at individual sites.

Lapita sites are big and contain large amounts of artef actual evidence, but this may be partly because they were used over long periods of time and, in the case of the richest sites, they were building up in water-logged environments where there is excellent preservation. Most of the sites in the Arawes were originally wooden structures over reefs and from these structures rubbish was thrown into shallow water and preserved (Gosden and Webb 1994). The Arawes structures are part of a larger class of sites composed of wooden structures over reefs (Kirch et ai 1991). When we consider the density of artefacts against the length of time over which the sites were created, discard rates are low and there may not have been that many pots or stone tools in use at any one time (Gosden 1991). Low levels of material culture in use at any period may indicate that these places were not settle- ments identical to coastal villages today, but spots on the landscape to which people returned on a regular basis. Furthermore, although all the tree crops and animals used in Melanesia today are found in waterlogged Lapita sites, which preserve plant remains (Gosden and Webb 1994), we should not leap to the conclusion that stable farming systems identical to those found today were in existence. Indeed, the high levels of soil erosion from the start of the Lapita period onwards (Gosden et ai 1989:573) indicate forms of land use unlike the swidden gardening of the present, which does not cause massive erosion. This destructive use of the landscape may have derived from ad hoc clearance and planting, which did not allow for conservation measures such as combining root and tree crops to prevent erosion that is found in many areas of Melanesia.

We must embrace the possibility that Lapita forms represent a mobile way of life, which in some ways continues long lasting traditions, deriving from Pleisto- cene forms of movement. An emphasis on mobility would recast Lapita sites as spots on the landscape to which people returned regularly and which perhaps had stands of nut bearing trees and areas of cleared land for garden plots nearby. We certainly know that widespread colonization occurred at this time, with people setting up per- manent habitations in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa for the first time and this may be tied in with continual movement within long settled areas.

This view that Lapita represents one huge community

rather than a series of small ones knit together by trade, provides a means of understanding both continuity and change. Forms of maritime mobility have a long history, perhaps stretching back into the Pleistocene in the Bismarck Archipelago (Irwin 1992). Mobility has also changed continuously as the difference between the Lapita and later forms of connections show. The fact that islands are always connected to other areas provides a challenge to the notion of landscape when applied to insular situations. Individual island landscapes respond to the network of connections in which they are enmeshed and the demands that these networks create.

Summary of the argument

We have argued that at all times the Arawes were orientated to areas outside of the group. At times, such as the last hundred years, this has been a relatively small area encompassing some 300 km east and west. At other times, particularly in the Lapita period, orientation has been to a much larger region encompassing the whole of the western Pacific. A marine focus throws doubt on any attempt to see the Arawes as an entity, either as individual islands or as a group. These islands certainly were not insular. However, over the last 3500 years there has been a progressive shrinkage of connections. Even if the exact model put forward for Lapita here is not accepted, it must be seen that during this period connections were extra- ordinarily wide. The scope of connections over the last millennium has been much smaller, probably being restricted to the ethnographically known system. This system has also reduced in scope due to colonialism, with groups such as the Tamis dropping out of trade. On the other hand, trade has increased in frequency of transaction and amounts transacted. This is due in part, at least, to greater productivity in the farming systems over the last 100 years. Indeed, only in the last century have full scale farming systems come about in the Arawes and this has brought about an unusual emphasis on the land when viewed from the perspective of prehistory.

We would like to make one broader point about the sea and mobility which fits in with the discussion at the start of the article. Irwin (1992) has presented a convincing argument that one sailing strategy has been employed in the Pacific from the mid-Holocene onwards which led to the colonisation of that ocean. We would like to put forward the notion that a single social strategy of colonisation was also used, of which Lapita is the best known example. This strategy involved the maintenance of interaction over huge areas when moving into new regions. Lapita provides evidence of interaction in the west, which should be seen together with growing evidence for interaction in east Polynesia which comes from both oral histories which tell of regular voyaging, and the movement of materials between different island groups (Cachola-Abad 1993, Leach 1993). The interaction spheres of Lapita and eastern Polynesia are by no means identical (pottery played a far greater role in the former

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than the latter, to take just one item), but it is increasingly likely that distant islands such as New Zealand and Hawaii may well have had long term and regular contact with central east Polynesia and not a small number of discrete waves of colonists. This evokes echoes of what happened two millennia or more earlier when western Polynesia was colonised. If we follow this hypothesis it will give a much greater unity to the processes by which the Pacific was settled, showing that east and west may have been peopled by the same set of strategies both of sailing and of creating social cohesion.

The breakdown of the development-in-isolation model has the power to provide a different picture of the Pacific and its historical trajectory. It also creates a new picture of what landscape is about in this region of the world. The islands of the Pacific and their changing sets of connections also pose problems for the concept of landscape, but rather than abandoning the notion we should extend it, so that landscapes and seascapes are considered jointly and seen to have differing powers of separation and connection at varying periods of history. The sea is not necessarily either a bridge or a barrier: it is what people make it. Just as the land can be made and remade by human influence, so can the sea.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Lesley Head, Geoff Irwin and Peter White for constructive comments on this paper. The maps were drawn by Alison Wilkins. The research in the Arawe Islands was funded by the ARC (in a program grant awarded to Gosden and Specht) for which we are extremely grateful.

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Archaeology in the North

Proceedings of the 1993 Australian Archaeological Association Conference

Edited by Marjorie Sullivan, Sally Brockwell & Ann Webb, and published by the North Australia Research Unit Australian National University, Darwin. 425pp. ISBN 0 7315 3030 0. Copies cost $30 (post & packing extra) and are available from NARU (attention Janet Sincock), PO Box 41 321 , Casuarina NT 081 1 ; Tel: 089-220066, Fax: 089-220055

Part 1 A tribute to Fred McCarthy Stephanie Moser - Introduction: the legacy of Fred McCarthy in

contemporary Australian archaeology Val Attenbrow and Kate Khan - FD McCarthy: his work and legacy at the

Australian Museum Stephanie Moser - Building the discipline of Australian archaeology: Fred

McCarthy at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Sandra Bowdler - Permeating the bamboo curtain: Fred McCarthy's

interesting questions Josephine McDonald - 'Everywhere you go you know he's been there

before': the influences of Fred McCarthy on rock art research in the Sydney Basin

Part 2 What's the point? Peter Thorley, Louis Warren and Peter Veth - Wardaman point technology:

an examination of sites recorded during CRM investigations in the Victoria River region

Peter Hiscock - The end of points Mike Smith and Sally Brockwell -Archaeological investigations at a stratified

open site near Humpty Doo, northern Australia Part 3 Middens, mounds and megapodes Geoff Bailey - The Weipa shell mounds: natural or cultural? Marilyn Truscott - Towards a type profile of coastal middens in Australia Mike Rowland - Mounds around the world: a contribution to understanding

Australian shell middens and mounds Elizabeth Williams - Earth mounds in south-west Victoria: what were they

used for and how do we know they are cultural features? Bruce Veitch - Hearth stones in the mound: one variable that may aid in the

differentiation between shell mounds and megapode incubation nests

Andrew Roberts -Cultural landmarks: the Milingimbi mounds Scott Mitchell - Stone exchange network in north-western Arnhem Land:

evidence for recent chronological change Fiona Mowat - Size really does matter: factors affecting shell fragmentation Part 4 Regional research Peter Veth, Tom Gara and Peter Kendrick - The Aboriginal face of rock art

on the Burrup Peninsula Paul Gorecki and Miranda Grant - Grinding patches from the Croydon

region, Gulf of Carpentaria Anne Ross - It depends on who you are: reflections of life at Peel Island

Lazaret Josephine McDonald, Elizabeth Rich and Huw Barton - The Rouse Hill

Infrastructure Project (Stage 1) on the Cumberland Plain, western Sydney: recent research and issues

Sue Feary- Assessing the cultural values of forests Philip Boot - Recent research into the prehistory of the hinterland of the

south coast of New South Wales David Collett - Engendered space and Aboriginal settlement on the coast of

Tasmania: a preliminary model Robin Sim - Prehistoric human occupation in the King and Furneaux Island

regions, Bass Strait Keryn Walshe - Tasmanian devils, Sarcophilus harrisii, and human

occupation: estimating the cultural component Jay Hall and René Viel - In search of the Preclassic at Copan, Honduras:

results of the 1993 University of Queensland field season Peter Randolph, Vemon Wilson, Cris Frampton and Graham Merritt -

Rottnest Island Aboriginal Prisoners Cemetery delineation of extent using Ground Penetrating Radar

171



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Are islands insular? Landscape vs. seascape in the case of the Arawe Islands, Papua New Guinea