‘The island world of Melanesia—ranging from New Guinea and the Bismarcks through the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia—is characterised more than anything by its boundless diversity in geography, language and culture. The deep historical roots of this diversity are only beginning to be uncovered by archaeological investigations, but as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the exciting discoveries being made across this region are opening windows to our understanding of the historical processes that contributed to such remarkably varied cultures. Archaeologies of Island Melanesia offers a sampling of some of the recent and ongoing research that spans such topics as landscape, exchange systems, culture contact and archaeological practice, authored by some of the leading scholars in Oceanic archaeology.’ — Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i Island Melanesia is a remarkable region in many respects, from its great ecological and linguistic diversity, to the complex histories of settlement and interaction spanning from the Pleistocene to the present. Archaeological research in Island Melanesia is currently going through a vibrant phase of exciting new discoveries and challenging debates about questions that apply far beyond the region. This volume draws together a variety of current perspectives in regional archaeology for Island Melanesia, focusing on Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea. It features both high-level theoretical approaches and rigorous data-driven case studies covering recent research in landscape archaeology, exchange and material culture, and cultural practices.

Over a span of 1000 years beginning around 800CE, the people of the Pacific Islands undertook a remarkable period of voyaging, political evolution, and cross-cultural interactions. Polynesian navigators encountered previously uninhabited lands, as well as already inhabited islands and the coast of the Americas. Island societies saw epic sagas of political competition and intrigue, documented through oral traditions and the monuments and artefacts recovered through archaeology. European entry into the region added a new episode of interaction with strange people from over the horizon. These histories provide an important cross-cultural perspective for the concept of 'the Middle Ages' from outside of the usual Old World focus.

Archaeology of the Solomon Islands presents the outcome of 20 years research in the Solomon Islands undertaken jointly by Richard Walter and Peter Sheppard, both leaders in the eld of Pacific archaeology. At the time of first European encounter, the peoples of Melanesia exhibited some of the greatest diversity in language, socio-political organisation and culture expression of any region on earth. This extraordinary diversity attracted scholars and resulted in coastal Melanesia becoming the birthplace of modern anthropology, and yet the area remains one of the least well-documented regions of the Pacific in archaeological terms. This synthesis of Solomon Island archaeology draws together all the research that has taken place in the field over the past 50 years. It takes a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach and considers the work of archaeologists, environmental scientists, anthropologists and historians. At the same time this volume highlights the results of the authors own considerable field research. Until recently, much Pacific archaeological research focused primarily on colonisation events and cultural-ecological interactions. Walter and Sheppard are interested too in the long-term development of diversity in coastal Melanesia and in the evolution of traditional Melanesian societies. As a case study they focus on the Roviana Chiefdom, an aggressive but highly successful polity based around headhunting, slave raiding and ritual violence that dominated the political economy of the Western Province into the early twentieth century. They also integrate the Solomon Islands into ongoing models and debates around Pacific culture - history, including in such key areas as human expansion during the Pleistocene, the spread of Austronesians, Lapita colonisation, the development of food production, the role of exchange systems, the concept and meaning of culture areas, and human impact on landscapes and ecosystems. This fascinating and very readable book is written for an archaeological audience but is also designed to be accessible to all readers interested in Pacific archaeology, anthropology and history. Featuring more than a hundred maps and figures, Archaeology of the Solomon Islands represents a ground-breaking contribution to Pacific archaeology.

There can be little doubt on linguistic evidence that East Polynesia was first settled from West Polynesia. The author argues, however, that the related archaeological record has been made to fit this dominant paradigm. Her objective assessment of the material evidence indicates that there is no compelling reason to derive East Polynesian settlers from West Polynesia on archaeological grounds.

Concentrating their attention on the Pacific Islands, the contributors to this book show how the tightly focused social and economic systems of islands offer archaeologists a series of unique opportunities for tracking and explaining prehistoric change. From the 1950s onwards, excavations in such islands as Fiji, Palau and Hawaii revolutionised Oceanic archaeology and, as the major problems of cultural origins and island sequences were resolves, archaeologists came increasingly to study social change and to integrate newly acquired data on material culture with older ethnographic and ethnohistorical materials. The fascinating results of this work, centring on the evolution of complex Oceanic chiefdoms into something very much like classic 'archaic states', are authoritatively surveyed here.

This book integrates a region-wide chronological narrative of the archaeology of Pacific Oceania. How and why did this vast sea of islands, covering nearly one-third of the world’s surface, come to be inhabited over the last several millennia, transcending significant change in ecology, demography, and society? What can any or all of the thousands of islands offer as ideal model systems toward comprehending globally significant issues of human-environment relations and coping with changing circumstances of natural and cultural history? A new synthesis of Pacific Oceanic archaeology addresses these questions, based largely on the author’s investigations throughout the diverse region.

Providing a synthesis of archaeological and historical anthropological knowledge of the indigenous cultures of the Pacific islands, this text focuses on human ecology and island adaptations.