L Lapita Archaeology in the Southwest Pacific Frank R. Thomas 1 , Paul Geraghty 2 and Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith 3 1 Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture & Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji 2 School of Language, Arts & Media, University of the South Pacific Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji 3 Department of Anatomy, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Introduction Lapita refers primarily to a low-fired, earthenware ceramic style with distinctive decoration called dentate stamping (also combined with incising and other techniques), displaying elaborate geo- metric and anthropomorphic designs motifs (Chiu 2015; Figs. 1, 2, and 3; Kirch 2001), that has allowed archaeologists to track the first settlement from Near to Remote Oceania. The distribution of Lapita, from the Bismarck Archipelago to Samoa, a distance of over 4000 km, straddles the current ethnographic divide between Melanesia and west- ern Polynesia (Fig. 4). Near Oceania includes the islands stretching from New Guinea to the southern end of the main Solomon Islands chain. Remote Oceania extends east of a 400 km sea gap between the Solomon Islands and the Reef-Santa Cruz Group, and also covers all the Micronesian islands to the north, with the Mariana Islands, over 2000 km distant from the Philippines, yielding the first evidence of human settlement and pottery by 3500 BP (Carson 2018: 125). On present evidence, the Lapita ceramic series, which has also yielded a range of other portable artifacts, was the first to have reached the south- west islands of Remote Oceania (Green 1979). The spread of Lapita in Remote Oceania is asso- ciated by most historical linguists with the expan- sion of Proto-Oceanic, a sub-group of the Austronesian language family, represented by many languages spoken in Island Southeast Asia, including Taiwan. Because of the absence of evidence for pre- Lapita (archaeological) occupation east of the Solomon Islands, it has been suggested that fur- ther expansion into the eastern Pacific required significant improvements in navigational technol- ogy and knowledge not available to earlier Pleis- tocene and mid-Holocene inhabitants of Near Oceania, presumed to have spoken Papuan or non-Austronesian languages (Irwin 1992: 43, but see Donohue and Denham 2008 for morphosyntactic and phonological evidence in Vanuatu and New Caledonia suggesting links with non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea, and Geraghty 2017 for linguistic evidence that some languages of Vanuatu were influenced by a non-Austronesian substrate). In addition, the lim- ited distribution of wild edible plant and terrestrial animal resources on more distant islands may © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3410-1