141 THE RISE AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF LAPITA IN THE BISMARCK ARCHIPELAGO GLENN R. SUMMERHAYES DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND INTRODUCTION T he Bismarck Archipelago is located east of the main island of New Guinea and consists of the islands of New Britain, New Ireland and its off shore islands, the St Matthias group incorporating Mussau, and the Admiralties (Figure 1). Its location is strategically important as any inferred movement of people and/or ideas out of Southeast Asia into the Pacific should be seen in the archaeological record. With the New Guinea mainland to the west and the Solomon Island chain to the east, this area, which is also known as Near Oceania, has been populated for close to 40,000 years (Summerhayes 2007). Yet the earliest known settlement of the islands to the east in what is called Remote Oceania occurred in the late 4th millennium/early 3rd millennium BP. Archaeological attention on this late settlement has focussed on what Allen and White (1989: 129) have called as the “sine qua non of Lapita sites” ─ dentate-stamped pottery. It was the dentate-stamping that over 50 years ago led to the recognition of similarities between pottery from Watom (New Britain) (Meyer 1909, 1910, n.d.), the Ile des Pins (off New Caledonia), Fiji and the Lapita site (site 13 in New Caledonia) (Avias 1949; Gifford 1951; Gifford and Shutler 1956). Yet in modelling the behaviour behind similarities in Lapita pottery, archaeologists were for a long period working with a limited data set from the Bismarck Archipelago. Although the first published accounts of this pottery appeared in the early part of the 20 th century, and excavations were undertaken at Eloaua, Ambitle, Watom, Talasea, Balof, and Lesu in the 1960s and through to the 1970s (Egloff 1975; White and Specht 1971; Specht 1968, 1974; Downie and White 1978; White and Downie 1980), it was from the excavations from Remote Oceania that models of Lapita were based (Green 1979b). Serious anomalies in explaining the Lapita phenomenon existed. For instance, the movement of people into the previously unoccupied islands of Remote Oceania may explain similarities in material culture, but this could not apply to the Bismarcks that had been occupied for at least 40,000 years. Also exchange relationships were not expected to be the same in both Near and Remote Oceania (Kirch 1990: 119, 1997; Green and Kirch 1997). Although work continued in the early 1980s by Specht (1981) in West New Britain and Lilley (1986) in Siassi, the archaeology of sites bearing on Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago needed a boost. To redress this imbalance, the Lapita Homeland Project was set up in the mid 1980s and as a result long archaeological sequences have been defined for the Bismarck Archipelago many of them involving sites with Lapita pottery (Allen and Gosden 1991). Research was undertaken in Manus, Mussau, New Ireland,