Current Anthropology Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/97/3802-0001$3.00
The Dimensions of
Social Life in the
Pacific
Human Diversity and the Myth
of the Primitive Isolate 1
by John Edward Terrell,
Terry L. Hunt, and
Chris Gosden
The Pacific has been thought of as a region in which isolated societies are related to one another more by descent from the same
ancestral traditions than by continuing social, political, and economic interaction. The apparent marginality of island societies
has led scholars to assume that language, biology, and culture
have coevolved in this part of the world in such an orderly fashion that language can be used to circumscribe populations and reconstruct their ancient migrations and culture history. Cultural
evolution has often been conceptualized as a process of radiating
differentiation from a common source or (borrowing thought
from zoology and paleontology) a process of adaptive radiation.
During the pioneering phase of anthropological field research in
the Pacific after World War II, the simplifying assumption that
people who live on islands live isolated lives played a useful role.
Now scholars are working to improve the historical realism of
their claims and reconstructions. This shift in orientation promises to unify the study of history and synchronic analysis in the
Pacific as, in Alexander Lesser’s words, ‘‘parts of one universe of
discourse, of one order or level of the human social process.’’
john edward terrell is Curator of Anthropology at the Field
Museum (Chicago, Ill. 60605-2496, U.S.A.) Born in 1942, he was
educated at Harvard College (A.B., 1964) and Harvard University
(A.M., 1968; Ph.D., 1976). His publications include Prehistory in
the Pacific Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), (with Arapata Hakiwai) Ruatepupuke: A Maori Meeting
House (Chicago: Field Museum Press, 1994), and (with Pamela
Stewart) ‘‘The Paradox of Human Population Genetics at the End
of the Twentieth Century’’ (Reviews in Anthropology 25:13–33).
terry l. hunt is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Hawai’i–Manoa. He was born in 1955 and received
his B.A. from the University of Hawai’i–Hilo in 1976, his M.A.
from the University of Auckland in 1980, and his Ph.D. from the
University of Washington in 1989. Among his publications are
‘‘Patterns of Human Interaction and Evolutionary Divergence in
1. A number of people have given us help and useful comments.
In particular, we thank Melinda Allen, Peter Bellwood, David and
Dorothy Counts, Robert Dunnell, Paula Brown Glick, Ward
Goodenough, Michael Graves, Roger Green, Kevin Kelly, Jim Roscoe, Malcolm Ross, Jim Specht, Pamela Stewart, Don Tuzin, Jim
Watson, and Rob Welsch.
the Fiji Islands’’ (Journal of the Polynesian Society 96:299–334),
(with Michael Graves) ‘‘Some Methodological Issues of Exchange
in Prehistory’’ (Asian Perspectives 29:107–15), and (with Patrick
V. Kirch), the edited volume The To‘aga Site (Contributions of
the University of California Archaeological Research Facility,
1993).
chris gosden is Lecturer and Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University. He was born in 1955 and educated at
Sheffield University (B.A., 1977; Ph.D., 1982). He has published
Social Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), ‘‘Arboriculture
and Agriculture in Coastal Papua New Guinea’’ (Antiquity
69[265]:807–17), and (with J. Allen) The Results of the Lapita
Homeland Project (Australian National University, Department
of Prehistory, Occasional Papers 20).
The present paper was submitted 18 xii 95 and accepted
20 iii 96; the final version reached the Editor’s office 8 v 96.
The favored image of the Pacific and its peoples in songs
and stories is captured by the alluring words ‘‘The
South Seas’’: palm trees and blue lagoons, jungle drums
and nubile natives, maybe cannibals, too, and exotic fertility rites. Since the 1950s, however, scholars have also
had a favorite image of the Pacific, one as exotic as but
less romantic than Hollywood’s version. After World
War II there was a small migration of trained European
and American academicians to Micronesia, Melanesia,
some parts of Polynesia, and expanding university centers in New Zealand and Australia. As they began to
cultivate this research frontier, it became both professionally strategic and perhaps intellectually obvious to
argue that the remoteness and evident marginality of
the Pacific Islands were analytical virtues rather than
career handicaps. As Ralph Linton (1955:183) observed,
The marginal Malayo-Polynesian [Austronesian] cultures which have survived in Oceania and Madagascar have contributed little to the main streams of
cultural evolution. However, they have provided students of society and culture with some of their
most interesting comparative material. The relative
isolation of many of the islands and the general tendency of the Malayo-Polynesians to live in small endogamous tribes, or even villages which avoid outside contacts, has provided an excellent opportunity
for the study of the results of independent cultural
growth.
In 1961, Andrew Vayda at the 10th Pacific Science Congress said much the same thing in fewer words: that the
isolation of Pacific Island populations made them ‘‘convenient laboratories for us’’ (Vayda and Rappaport 1963:
143).
This claim was greeted with skepticism by some. David Schneider, for instance, remarked at the same congress that ‘‘the problem of isolation in island areas, as
distinct from continental areas, needs far more detailed
specification before we can easily accept the assumption that there is something very special about island
areas’’ (in Vayda and Rappaport 1963:143). But the appeal of islands as laboratories for anthropological re155
156 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
search was compatible with popular wisdom and Hollywood’s vision of islands as lost worlds and safe havens
for outcasts, beachcombers, and shipwrecked sailors. It
was easy to see the Pacific Islands as vest-pocket field
laboratories (Kirch 1986b) that were uninhabited or occupied only by culturally backward hunter-gatherers
until the colonial expansion of Neolithic Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) peoples sometime just before the
Christian era (Linton 1955:173–78; Oliver 1951: 15–21;
Suggs 1960).
This way of thinking about islands and their inhabitants dominated Pacific Islands research for decades.
Currently, however, scholarly views are undergoing a
major shift in perspective and underlying assumptions.
This shift is driven by new research data—notably in
archaeology, social anthropology, experimental voyaging, and human genetics—and the corresponding need
for new theoretical perspectives on space, time, and process. A new research agenda is replacing the agenda that
has guided Pacific studies since the 1950s. Instead of
looking at these islands as remote, undeveloped human
colonies scattered across a vast and empty expanse of
sea, we are finding that the Pacific was a notably early
sphere of human accomplishments, on land and sea,
and the ocean more an avenue for interchange than a
barrier to human affairs.
We want to emphasize that the changes happening today in Pacific scholarship are relevant to other parts of
the world. European exploration and colonization after
1492 fostered in popular culture and in anthropology
what Alexander Lesser (1961) once called the myth of
the primitive isolate: the view of early or primitive human life as a world of closed social aggregates, each out
of contact with others. This conception reinforced the
commonsense conviction that the world was a mosaic
of separate societies and ethnic traditions (Lewis 1991).
Yet it now appears that not even the small island societies of the vast Pacific fit this comfortable stereotype.
This article has three parts. First we review elements,
assumptions, and limitations of Pacific research since
World War II that we shall refer to as the 1950s agenda.
Then we discuss evidence and analyses incompatible
with that agenda. Lastly we suggest another way of
thinking about the dimensions of social life in the Pacific and review some of the implications—both analytical and methodological—of this alternative approach
to Pacific prehistory, society, and human diversity.
The 1950s Research Agenda
Linton and Vayda were not the first to see the Pacific
Islands as a promising region for scientific research. As
one outcome of World War II, the United States found
itself a major Pacific power with administrative responsibility for most of Micronesia. ‘‘Our recent war in the
Pacific brought into sharp focus the glaring lack of scientific knowledge and data in practically every field and
hampered military operations in many different ways.
It has become widely evident that the prosecution of
fundamental research in the Pacific area is a matter of
vital importance to our national defense’’ (Pacific Science Board 1947:6). In 1945 the National Research
Council began reviewing suggestions for developing
new scientific activities in the Pacific. The following
year George Peter Murdock of Yale and Harold J. Coolidge of Harvard organized a Pacific Science Conference
in Washington, D.C., at which ‘‘there was great enthusiasm for the establishment of a progressive program of
future research in the Pacific area’’ (Pacific Science
Board 1947:7).
As a result, the National Research Council established the Pacific Science Board under the chairmanship
of Knowles A. Ryerson of the University of California
‘‘to aid the scientists of America who wish to engage in
scientific investigations for which there is a need in the
Pacific area, to advise governmental and other agencies
on scientific matters pertaining to the Pacific, and to
further international cooperation in the field of Pacific
Science’’ (letter, Ryerson to the Librarian, Chicago Museum of Natural History, March 15, 1950). The board
subsequently organized the Coordinated Investigation
of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA) and dispatched
over 40 scientists—most of whom were social anthropologists—from more than 20 universities and museums ‘‘not only to help fill a gap in our scientific knowledge of the Marshalls, Carolines and Marianas which
have been virtually closed to Western scientists during
their 30 years occupation by the Japanese, but also to
answer the pressing need of the Navy for basic information that would assist them in setting up adequate and
practical civilian government in the area’’ (Pacific Science Board 1947:11). Those involved in the project were
aware that it was the largest coordinated field program
ever attempted by anthropologists (Murdock 1948b; see
also Bashkow 1991:178–88).
Judging by contemporary statements, the dearth of
basic information on Micronesia valuable for scientific,
military, and administrative purposes was good justification for investing time, effort, and American money
in Pacific research. ‘‘Anthropologists have long been curious about the area because its ethnography has been
little known, though suspected of containing clues essential to an understanding of culture history in the farther Pacific’’ (Murdock 1948a:9–10). If needed, however, there was another rationale. As one government
official noted at the 1946 Pacific Science Conference,
changing conditions in the Pacific following the war
made it imperative ‘‘that scientific research, carefully
and intelligently planned, should be encouraged, lest
once again knowledge be lost by inaction or delay’’ (A. L.
Moffat, quoted in National Research Council 1946:9).
islands as laboratories
By the 1950s, however, a third reason to work in the
Pacific had evidently come to the fore. Research on island societies was needed not only to increase scientific
knowledge in a timely fashion but also because—as
Margaret Mead had written in Coming of Age in Samoa
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 157
in 1928—the geographic isolation, cultural simplicity,
and autonomous historical development of Pacific Island societies made them ‘‘controlled examples’’ where
anthropologists could study human nature under conditions approximating ‘‘the ideal method of science, the
method of the controlled experiment’’ in a laboratory
(Mead 1928:5–6).
The research tactic of treating Pacific societies—because of their presumed isolation, simplicity, and
shared cultural ancestry—as controllable human experiments fortunately available for comparative analysis
appears to have been popular by the 1950s. Perhaps this
popularity was due to Mead’s advocacy of the idea;
more certainly, it reflected the continuing allegiance of
American anthropologists (e.g., Ackerknecht 1954, Eggan 1954, Steward 1955) to the Boasian agenda for anthropology and its insistence on methodologically rigorous solutions (Lowie 1937:155) as the indispensable
condition for the progress of ‘‘our science’’ (Boas
1940[1896]:279). The research directive of Franz Boas’s
‘‘historical method,’’ after all, was unequivocal. If anthropology is ‘‘to establish the laws governing the
growth of culture it must not confine itself to comparing the results of the growth alone, but whenever such
is feasible it must compare the processes of growth, and
these can be discovered by means of studies of the cultures of small geographical areas’’ (Boas 1940 [1896]:
280).
In the 1950s establishing laws governing the growth
of culture ‘‘through very detailed comparative studies
of particular societies in a given culture area’’ (Mead
1957) was also seen as an acceptable way of bringing the
study of cultural evolution back into anthropology
(Steward 1955; Wolf 1974:27–31). In spite of apparent
differences between biological and cultural evolution,
biological ways of thinking about evolutionary change
were too close at hand to be ignored altogether. As Marshall Sahlins wrote in the preface to his Social Stratification in Polynesia, ‘‘It is not claimed that the methodology or the concepts involved are new ones. The
novelty of the present study is the attempt to explain
social differentiation within a group of genetically related cultures. The Polynesian cultures derive from a
common source; they are members of a single cultural
genus that has filled in and adapted to a variety of local
habitats’’ (Sahlins 1958:ix).
Ward Goodenough recalls that the model of evolution
as adaptive radiation was well established in biology at
that time and that a comparable approach had already
been taken by Linton in The Tree of Culture (1955). He
adds (personal communication, April 11, 1994):
It was a badly flawed book from a factual viewpoint. Linton relied too much on memory and the
book was put together posthumously, which did not
help. Yet he was the one anthropologist ever to look
at the sweep of human history from Lower Paleolithic times on as one involving the phylogenetic
branching of cultures, mixed with subsequent crosscutting diffusion. This was his theme in a course on
world ethnography I took with him in the spring of
1947, when I was a graduate student at Yale.
Goodenough himself drafted such a program for Pacific
studies in late December 1956 at the annual meetings
of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. ‘‘As one who had had training as an undergraduate in historical linguistics, the phyletic approach to
evolution, with radiating differentiation through time,
was the only one that ever made any sense to me. . . .
So that was where I was coming from. I had been thinking that way about Oceania and when the chance came
to take part in the symposium I used it as an opportunity to formulate the thought’’ (personal communication, April 11, 1994). He concluded his AAAS presentation (Goodenough 1957:154) with this declaration:
Because Oceania provides such instances of ‘‘pure’’
cultural radiation unaffected by external contacts, it
is the logical place to work out the problems of cultural reconstruction based on the comparison of related cultures. A comparative method to this end,
once worked out, could then be applied to other areas where cultural relationships of a phylogenetic
sort have been obscured by a more complicated history of contact and cultural diffusion across phylogenetic lines.
His AAAS paper was later published in the Journal of
the Polynesian Society with a preamble by Margaret
Mead titled ‘‘Introduction to Polynesia as a Laboratory
for the Development of Models in the Study of Cultural
Evolution.’’ He was so articulate in setting out ‘‘the
next steps in our understanding of the evolutionary development of human cultures’’ (Mead 1957) that a great
deal of the research work done in archaeology, linguistics, and human biology in the Pacific for the next 30
years might be seen as an extended footnote to his brilliant AAAS presentation (Kirch and Green 1987).
Goodenough offered three primary research proposals, each of which rested on the standard premise that—
as phrased by Vayda and Rappaport in 1961—‘‘relatively small dryland areas, whether islands or island
groups,’’ have human populations ‘‘whose contacts
with other human populations are prevented entirely or
greatly restricted by the ocean or by other water barriers’’ (Vayda and Rappaport 1963:133). The first proposal
was that anthropologists working in the Pacific should
study ‘‘something akin to what the geneticists call
‘drift’ ’’ (Goodenough 1957:146). This project had its advocates, mostly human biologists, in later years (e.g.,
Giles 1973:394–95). Goodenough’s personal interpretation of the biologist’s idea of genetic drift, however,
seems to have attracted less attention (but see Kirch and
Green 1987:440–41; Vayda 1959; Vayda and Rappaport
1963). He anticipated that the pattern of cultural drift
in the Pacific would prove to be a progressive west-toeast loss of portions of ‘‘the common heritage in very
small populations’’ that had to be ‘‘compensated by substitute innovations developed by new combinations and
elaborations of those traditional elements remaining’’
158 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
(1957:150–51). This possibility proved to be less arresting than his other proposals as a way of deciphering
cultural differences in the Pacific.
Goodenough’s second proposal, mirrored in companion papers by Marshall Sahlins (1957) and Irving Goldman (1957) given before the same AAAS gathering, was
more energetically pursued by others (e.g., Goldman
1970, Kirch 1980, Vayda 1959). This was his observation that the high islands and coral atolls of the Pacific
presented scholars with ‘‘two rather distinct types of
environment’’ and that high islands were ‘‘incomparably richer’’ than atoll environments (Goodenough
1957:151–52). It should follow, therefore, that ‘‘over
and over again adaptations to the atoll environment
were made independently by people with a high island
background.’’ Hence, ‘‘careful comparison within eastern Polynesia [in particular] between high island and
atoll societies—especially within areas of internal communication—should enable us to sort out those features of the eastern Polynesian cultural tradition which
could flourish only in high island communities, and to
discern those aspects of atoll culture which are specific
adaptations to the atoll environment’’ (1957:152, 153).
However, what seemed ‘‘even more important’’ than
this project to both Goodenough and Margaret Mead
was the conviction that ‘‘the next steps in our understanding of the evolutionary development of human
cultures must come through very detailed comparative
studies of particular societies in a given culture area’’
(Mead 1957). By following, in Mead’s words, ‘‘modern
genetic theory (that is, the comparative, phylogenetic,
or ‘‘family tree’’ method of historical linguistics [see
Hoenigswald and Wiener 1987, Bouquet 1996]), scholars
would be equipped to take a fresh approach to ‘‘materials which have been worked over so often in the past.’’
Or, as Goodenough phrased the goal, they could not
only compare people by types of environment but also
‘‘sort cultures into phylogenetic families’’ (1957:146).
Why did this task seem important? Because, Goodenough said, systematic comparison of the cultures of
Oceania ‘‘should enable us to reconstruct in large measure the shape of the parent culture’’ and thereby help
us understand how ‘‘a number of small societies with a
common linguistic and cultural heritage’’ have radiated
in isolation, that is, how they have ‘‘become progressively different from each other’’ (1957:146, 154).
Therefore, Goodenough proposed to the AAAS that
the island societies of Oceania, by virtue of their relative isolation and common ancestry, were ‘‘peculiarly
interesting’’ (1957:147) for several reasons:
1. The isolation of Oceanic societies ensured that we
would be able to ‘‘get some idea of the capacity of the[ir]
parent culture for modification without the addition of
new cultural strains from new contact and borrowing’’
(1957:146).
2. We should be able to identify cultural differences
attributable to ‘‘random loss of portions of the common
heritage in very small populations, as in the presumably
frequent instances in which an island’s inhabitants
were derived from a canoe-load or two of initial settlers’’ (1957:150).
3. We should also be successful in figuring out what
differences are due to ‘‘the adaptation of a common heritage to local ecological conditions’’ (1957:150).
4. Most important, once scholars had sorted Pacific
cultures into phylogenetic families, the knowledge thus
secured would let them ‘‘examine critically the processes by which phylogenetically related cultures
become progressively different from each other’’ (1957:
146).
support for the agenda
Goodenough’s 1956 paper was programmatic, not descriptive. He supported his proposals more by suggestion than by demonstration. Specifically, he outlined
the following points ‘‘to summarize our present understanding of the islands’ settlement and the historical relationships between their peoples’’ (1957:147–48):
1. The linguistic and cultural unity of Polynesia exceeds that of Micronesia and greatly exceeds that of
Melanesia.
2. The languages of Micronesia, Polynesia, and the
smaller islands and coastal areas of Melanesia belong
to a single family, Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian).
These languages are linked historically with the languages of island and parts of mainland Southeast Asia,
Taiwan, and southern China.
3. The languages of most of New Guinea and the interior reaches of the larger Melanesian islands are apparently unrelated to the Malayo-Polynesian family: ‘‘The
Papuan languages, as they are called, probably comprise
several distinct families.’’
4. The linguistic evidence implies that Papuan-speakers belong to an older population in Melanesia. ‘‘Subsequently, the coasts and smaller islands of the Pacific
were settled by peoples speaking Malayo-Polynesian
languages.’’ Their ultimate homeland was probably the
coasts and rivers of southern China, ‘‘whence they developed trading enterprises and colonies in Indonesia
and the Philippines.’’
5. ‘‘The magnitude of operations at an early date’’ is
suggested by a geological and radiocarbon date of about
1500 b.c. from the Marianas. ‘‘Whether this represents
a deliberate or (probably) an accidental settlement, it
implies considerable boat traffic in the southeastern
Philippines or western Carolines as early as the first
half of the second millennium b.c.’’
Goodenough went on to expand (somewhat) on these
basic points. He mentioned, in particular, up-to-date
work on the ‘‘linguistic phylogeny’’ of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Oceania and Andrew Sharp’s ‘‘recent important contribution’’ (Sharp 1956) showing that
prehistoric voyaging in the Pacific ‘‘was confined to
short distances, rarely exceeding 200 miles of open sea.’’
However, he does not appear to have been arguing in
1956 for a ‘‘fast-train’’ model (Allen 1984) of MalayoPolynesian migration out into the Pacific. Historical
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 159
(linguistic) subgroupings of Oceanic Malayo-Polynesian
languages are sufficiently distinct, he said, to indicate
old settlement; their geographic distribution ‘‘strongly
implies that Malayo-Polynesian peoples settled here
and there along the coasts of the larger Melanesian islands, where Papuan communities were already located, before venturing further into the Pacific’’ (1957:
148). In view of our growing understanding of Pacific
prehistory, it is worth noting that Goodenough made
little of the differences between Polynesians and Melanesians in physical appearance. He noted that Polynesians have generally been regarded as a distinct racial
type and Melanesia is an area of extreme genetic (i.e.,
biological) variation. But this pattern, he said, is only to
be expected ‘‘given the accidental settlement of Polynesia and Micronesia by a few small groups of occasional
west-to-east castaways and a much larger number of
their descendants as later east-to-west castaways, and
given the progressive genetic isolation from west to east
by way of initially very small populations which this
implies’’ (1957:150–51).
There is still support among scholars working in the
Pacific for such an outline of Oceanic (or at least Austronesian) prehistory (see, e.g., reviews by Bellwood
1991, Hill and Serjeantson 1989, Pawley and Ross 1993,
Spriggs 1993), but there was room for doubt from the
start.
limiting assumptions
How much Goodenough’s 1956 AAAS symposium paper influenced the way in which other scholars working
in the Pacific framed their research endeavors after
World War II is an open historical question. Certainly
others during the 1950s were pursuing similar issues
(e.g., Watson 1963, and see Kirch and Green 1987), and
Roger Green (personal communication, April 7, 1994)
recalls that such ideas were very much to the fore in the
mid-1950s. But the history of anthropology after World
War II is mostly unexplored academic territory (e.g.,
Geertz 1995, Wolf 1974). When that history has been
written, we suspect that the following observations
about time, space, and process will still be seen as characteristic of anthropological thought in the Pacific after
the war.
First, radiocarbon dating was a postwar development.
Even after the first radiocarbon determinations for archaeological finds in Oceania began to be published—
and debated—there was a prevailing sense that the
Pacific had probably been the last place on earth to be
colonized by humankind in ancient times. It was recognized that people had undoubtedly reached Melanesia
and Australia long ago, but nobody seemed particularly
concerned to find out how long ago (possibly because
the story of the Malayo-Polynesians and the settlement
of Polynesia seemed more consequential). David Harris
recalled recently, ‘‘I well remember, as an undergraduate in the early 1950s, being taught that Australia was
a laggard among the inhabited continents, not colonized
until a mere 5000 or so years ago when humans, probably accompanied by dingoes, appeared on the scene’’
(Harris 1994:3 see also Allen 1972:181; White and
O’Connell 1982:173, 196–210).
Second, Goodenough’s remarks before the AAAS in
1956 show that scholars knew that the subdivision of
the Pacific region into culture areas labeled Polynesia,
Micronesia, Melanesia, and Malaysia or Southeast Asia
was more convenient than realistic. Nevertheless, the
prevailing sense of Pacific Islands cultural geography remained tied to these 19th-century subdivisions (Clark
and Terrell 1978, Golson 1972b, Green 1991, Terrell
1986b, Thomas 1989). They continued to serve as the
accepted spatial grid for studying human diversity and
prehistory in the Pacific. As Alexander Spoehr wrote in
1952, ‘‘It is largely within this framework that students
of Oceanic prehistory have attempted to reconstruct the
past movements of peoples, the diffusion of cultures,
and the development of regional culture growths’’
(Spoehr 1952:457–58).
Finally, the prevailing sense or understanding of historical change—of causal process—was grounded in the
idea that isolation in combination with local environmental circumstances leads to cultural differentiation
(Spoehr 1952:464):
The island environment itself had decidedly limiting influences. Large concentrations of population
acting as points of continuous diffusion and interaction over a major region were virtually impossible,
at least in contrast to continental areas such as
Meso-America or the Near East. Despite their facility with water craft, the Micro-Polynesians [i.e., the
peoples of Polynesia and Micronesia] must have
found the ocean a barrier. Diffusion could not take
place, of course, without actual migration in this
area, except locally, and even major island groups
must have experienced considerable periods of isolation.
It should be stressed that isolation was taken to be a
dominant factor behind culture change not just in Micronesia and Polynesia, where islands are separated by
immense stretches of open sea. As Goodenough’s remarks in 1956 illustrate (Goodenough 1957:154), warfare and rugged topography were seen as playing a comparable role in keeping people apart in Melanesia, too
(e.g., Golson 1972c:22).
Stated simply, therefore, the defining features of anthropological thought in the Pacific after World War II
may be characterized as (1) the apparent shallowness of
time, (2) the continued use of an admittedly old-fashioned culture-area-grid to frame research issues, limit
the scope of needed information, and report results, and
(3) the acceptance of isolation as a defining feature of
life in Oceania. It is conceivable that on their own these
three elements might not have led to the kind of comparativist research agenda described by Goodenough in
1956. Perhaps they might just as easily have favored
160 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
narrow historical particularism. But as George Stocking
and others have noted, after the war there was a resurgence within anthropology of ‘‘the controlling promise
of scientific knowledge against the horror of the Holocaust and the universal terror of the atomic bomb’’
(Stocking 1989a:265; see also Geertz 1995). It was commonly said at the time (e.g., Kluckhohn 1953:507) that
linguistics was the most scientific of the ‘‘four fields’’
within anthropology (i.e., biological, sociocultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology). Perhaps,
therefore, it is not surprising that Mead, Goodenough,
and others saw the comparative method of historical
linguistics as the route to follow to unravel the prehistory of the Pacific and explain the ethnological diversity
of its peoples.2
Nowadays, according to a recent review by William
H. Durham, the goals outlined by Goodenough in 1956
are not mainstream concerns in anthropology and related social sciences. Surely, however, this is not for the
reason he offers, namely, that such efforts—which Durham includes together with ‘‘co-evolution’’ or ‘‘dual
inheritance theory’’ under the rubric ‘‘evolutionary culture theory’’ (ECT)—are only a ‘‘relatively new endeavor’’ (Durham 1992:332). We think that there is a
more likely explanation. Few anthropologists would reject Durham’s observation ‘‘that the socially transmitted information systems we call ‘cultures’ provide human populations with an important second source of
heritable variation’’ (p. 331). But the agenda outlined by
Goodenough in 1956, revisited 30 years later by Kirch
and Green (1987) and now promoted by Durham, relies
on other propositions that limit its generality and detract from its plausibility. These propositions are as follows:
1. Island societies are isolated cultures. Writing
about the Galápagos Islands and biological evolution,
Jonathan Weiner has recently observed, ‘‘The origin of
species is the origin of the invisible, isolating walls that
arise between two populations and make them living islands’’ (1995:169). But are there ‘‘invisible walls’’ between human populations? John Donne wrote centuries
ago, ‘‘No Man is an Iland, intire of it selfe.’’ Durham
asserts that ‘‘genuine cultural hybrids’’ among human
populations are rare and that it is normal for ‘‘new cultures’’ to evolve in isolation because ‘‘there exist a
number of effective barriers to hybridization—ecological, psychological, linguistic, and cultural—that act as
2. For social anthropologists—unlike archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and historical linguists—who were not primarily interested in unraveling Pacific prehistory and explaining its ethnological diversity, the Pacific Islands may simply have been
appealing as sites for research because of their circumscription; in
such places it looked possible to accomplish the Boasian goal of
writing the holistic, fine-grained ethnographies of particular societies required for scientific cultural comparison (see Stocking 1989a:
266; 1989b:4–5; also Howard and Borofsky 1989:3–7). While it was
not so easy for social anthropologists to draw a line around ‘‘my
people’’ (Stocking 1989a:211) in New Guinea, working there was
undoubtedly attractive to some because of the evident cultural purity of societies so recently contacted by government officers and
foreign missionaries.
transmission isolating mechanisms (TRIMs), by analogy to the reproductive isolating mechanisms (RIMs) of
speciation theory in biology’’ (1992:333). As we shall
show, this claim is now questioned even for Polynesia,
where Durham says the results of ECT ‘‘bode well for
the future of cultural descent studies in archeology and
anthropology more generally’’ (p. 337; see also Moore
1994a:12).
2. Cultural evolution, like biological speciation, is a
branching or phyletic process. Goodenough, Kirch and
Green, and Durham have similarly noted—using differing wording—that ‘‘a principal assumption in ECT is
that new cultures generally originate from pre-existing
‘parental cultures’ via a splitting or branching process
called ‘‘diversification’ or ‘culture birth’ ’’ (Durham
1992:333). Unfortunately, as Durham says (pp. 333–34),
this assumption is confining. It evidently binds us to
the idea that ‘‘diversification is normally a process of
uniparental fissioning; although the so-called ‘daughter
cultures’ produced in this way may certainly go on to
acquire many of their features by subsequent diffusion,
in most cases they still begin as offshoots from a single
parental stock’’ (p. 333). But as Kirch and Green had earlier observed in their own review of evolutionary theory, ‘‘there has been a tendency to extol the ‘laboratorylike’ virtues of oceanic islands that accrue from isolation, but this notion of closed systems can be carried
too far’’ (1987:442). This assumption, they tell us, is unlikely to hold for most of the Pacific: ‘‘As our archaeological knowledge of external contact has increased, it
has become evident that relatively few Oceanic islands
were ever fully isolated and, to the contrary, many of
those in the southwestern Pacific have been part of extensive long-distance exchange systems for hundreds or
even thousands of years’’ (see also Kirch 1986b). As we
shall show, contrary to the expectations of some including Goodenough (1957:150), diversification by uniparental fissioning may not even hold for eastern Polynesia (Green 1994b:42–43).
3. ‘‘History,’’ ‘‘descent,’’ or ‘‘homology’’ is a prime
determinant of culture change. ‘‘Ethnic groups’’ and
‘‘cultures’’—despite births and deaths and people coming and going—are seen as real, enduring entities, not
just heuristic abstractions. Like individuals, these aggregate phenomena are thought of as having ancestors,
descendants, relatives, and ‘‘patterns of hierarchical descent’’ (Mace and Pagel 1994:551). And Durham complains that ‘‘descent has rarely been given its due, in
part because of the difficulty of obtaining the necessary
data, comparative and/or diachronic, but also because
of a prejudice widely held since Boas that diffusion reliably ‘swamps’ all traces of phylogeny’’ (1992:334–35).3
3. The idea of descent is so fundamental to the anthropologist’s
concept of culture that in some respects it is difficult to see what
Durham is complaining about here. What zoologists call phylogenetic ‘‘inertia’’ (Wilson 1975:32–37) or ‘‘constraint’’ (McKitrick
1993), evolution by ‘‘tinkering’’ ( Jacob 1977), ‘‘preadaptation’’ or
‘‘exaptation’’ (Gamble 1993:5), the ‘‘panda principle’’ of contrivances ‘‘jury-rigged from parts available’’ (Gould 1986), etc., is commonly dealt with in anthropology using other terms, such as
‘‘bricolage’’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966:16–17), ‘‘cultural givens,’’ and ‘‘pri-
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 161
In this regard, however, Goodenough’s remarks in 1956
were unambiguous: the progressive loss of elements
from the original heritage of the Polynesians as they
moved through the Pacific from west to east had to be
compensated for by substituting innovations developed
by new combinations and elaborations ‘‘of those traditional elements remaining’’ (1957:151). Goodenough’s
apparent a priori valuation of cultural inheritance over
innovation in shaping culture change shows clearly, we
think, what can happen when the methodology and
agenda of one discipline (here, comparative linguistics)
are transferred to other fields, other data sets.
initial challenges
From the mid-1950s onward, Pacific experts generally
accepted that Sharp’s Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific
(1956) and Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia (1963) refuted
the romantic claims made by the previous generation of
scholars that ancient Pacific Islanders, especially Polynesians, had been skillful, cosmopolitan voyagers, authentic ‘‘Vikings of the sunrise’’ (as the Maori scholar
Sir Peter Buck titled his 1938 book championing such
a view). Sharp argued that prehistoric methods of navigation and sailing everywhere in the world had never
been good enough for people to find new islands, determine their true geographic locations, return home
safely, and later either lead deliberate voyages of colonization back to their discoveries or tell others how to
reach them. Consequently, he insisted, prehistoric Pacific Islanders could only have discovered islands to colonize by one-way voyages in which deliberate navigation to known destinations played no part. And once
ashore, the new colonists would have been lost to the
world if they had been forced to sail more than a few
hundred miles from home to find new land.
This view of ancient voyaging capabilities attracted a
great deal of attention in the 1950s and 1960s, both for
and against. Some considered Sharp’s arguments demeaning, but his thesis fit the assumptions underlying
the 1950s agenda. As Irving Goldman explained at the
beginning of his own 1956 AAAS symposium paper
later published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society,
‘‘The choice of an island area, such as Oceania, is a fortunate one. As a result of their relative cultural isolation, islands are more sheltered from the overwhelming
effects of diffusion, and variant forms are more clearly
observable. In this respect, the Polynesian islands, the
most removed from continental masses, are most famordialist’’ readings of ethnicity (see Linnekin and Poyer 1990).
His complaint is more understandable if ‘‘descent’’ is changed to
‘‘cladistic methods’’ (see Mace and Pagel 1994) or ‘‘phylogenetic
classification.’’ It is important to add that the concept of phylogenetic constraint is problematic in evolutionary theory. As Mary
McKitrick says: ‘‘In some sense, all evolutionary studies implicate
phylogenetic constraint, and reviewing the topic is like trying to
catch a greased pig’’ (McKitrick 1993:309). Her paper is a good introduction to the problems of testing hypotheses of constraint and
deciding when phylogenetic history may be more important than
adaptation in explaining observed patterns of diversity.
vourably situated for our purposes’’ (Goldman 1957:
374). He added a footnote in the published version of his
paper: ‘‘Since this was written I have read Sharp 1956,
and see his book as corroboration of the thesis that
Polynesian culture is to be explained primarily from internal developments rather than from diffusion’’ (1957:
375 n. 4).
Ironically, and mostly in hindsight, some of the first
archaeological evidence weighing in against the idea
that island societies are isolated societies—a style of
prehistoric pottery called Lapita—was seen at the time
as a grand exception that proved the rule. As early as
1960 Robert C. Suggs was able to report in The Island
Civilizations of Polynesia that ‘‘some unusual pottery’’
with stamped and incised decorations had been excavated at a locality called Lapita near Koné on New Caledonia and was also showing up in small quantities at
archaeological sites in Fiji and Tonga. He astutely predicted that this pottery might ‘‘ultimately attain increased archaeological importance’’ (1960:70). Jack Golson suggested that the discovery of Lapita pottery in
both Melanesia and Polynesia implied that the cultural
boundary line drawn by ethnologists between Melanesia and Polynesia needed to be reconsidered. The
widespread ‘‘early community of culture’’ witnessed by
this pottery had apparently preceded the ‘‘Melanesian
cultures’’ of Melanesia and was ancestral to the historic
cultures of western Polynesia (Golson 1961:176).
Soon discovering why Lapita pottery had appeared
suddenly around 3,500 years ago at prehistoric sites
scattered across a wide arc of the western Pacific from
Papua New Guinea to Samoa became one of the ruling
passions of Pacific scholarship (Clark and Terrell 1978,
Kirch 1988, Terrell n.d.a). During the 1960s archaeological fieldwork conducted by a number of investigators
in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa focused on locating ‘‘the immediate homeland’’ of the Polynesians somewhere in
these archipelagoes and on discovering how the ‘‘Lapita
culture’’ had evolved there into ‘‘Polynesian culture’’
(Green 1967, 1968). Rarely then (or now) did anyone dispute the inference that Lapita was the key to Polynesian
origins (Allen 1991; Ambrose 1978:332; Golson 1968:
10; 1972b:10; 1982:19; Green 1967; 1968; 1991:499;
Kirch 1982:57, 64; Shutler and Marck 1975; but see Gorecki 1992). While today we can see that Lapita runs
against the notion of islands-as-isolates, Pacific specialists in the 1950s and later years followed Sharp’s lead
and accepted that people making Lapita pottery had
been only skillful enough to get to Polynesia, not skillful enough to keep in touch with one another after they
had got there (Irwin 1992).
By the 1970s, however, ‘‘the role of Lapita in the settlement of Melanesia, its relationships to other Melanesian ceramic traditions, and, indeed, the ultimate origins of Lapita itself were issues beginning to capture
archaeological attention’’ (Kirch 1988:5). As interest in
Lapita pottery shifted from the problem of Polynesian
origins to the origins of Lapita, scholars began to line
up behind strongly opposed views of how Lapita got its
pots. Some prehistorians linked Lapita not only with
162 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
Polynesians but also directly wtih early Southeast
Asian pottery making and the inferred Asian homeland
of all Austronesian languages (Bellwood 1975, 1978a, b,
1988; Brace and Hinton 1981; Ross 1989; Shutler and
Marck 1975; Solheim 1964). Others said that Lapita was
largely a homegrown Melanesian product that had developed somewhere in the Bismarck Archipelago—that
is, at the western limit of the known distribution of
Lapita pottery—and from there spread eastward as far
as Tonga and Samoa (Allen 1984; Allen and White 1989;
Green 1979, 1982; Spriggs 1984; White and Allen 1980;
White, Allen, and Specht 1988). At issue, therefore, has
been whether Melanesians had much of a hand in what
happened ca. 3,000–3,500 years ago (Green 1994b:35).
A question neglected during this academic debate
was how well Sharp’s thesis about prehistoric voyaging
skills and the inherent isolation of island societies fit
areas of the Pacific other than Polynesia. In a series of
papers on human biogeography in Melanesia written in
the 1970s, Terrell and his colleagues (Callen 1976;
Clark and Terrell 1978; Cummings 1973; Kaplan 1976;
Terrell 1974, 1976, 1977; Terrell and Fagan 1975; Terrell and Irwin 1972) explicitly argued against the 1950s
research logic of comparative cultural reconstruction.
They recast the islands-as-laboratories theme in light of
current thinking in locational geography (e.g., Chorley
and Haggett 1967), Americanist archaeology and the
concept of interaction spheres (Caldwell 1964), and zoogeography (notably MacArthur and Wilson’s Theory of
Island Biogeography [1967]). Following Simberloff
(1974), they took a dynamic view of island isolation:
‘‘Islands are good places to study the world. They come
in all sizes, shapes and degrees of complexity. They are
numerous. They can be found near continents that are
sources of new immigrants. They can be found far off
in seclusion: places where evolution can go on virtually
free of outside interference’’ (Terrell 1976:3).
Their efforts were not the only ones to break away
from the portrayal of island societies in the Pacific as
social and cultural isolates. In 1975, Brian Egloff published a report on his archaeological investigations in
the Madang area of northeastern New Guinea and on
Eloaue Island in the St. Matthias group in which he
raised the possibility that Lapita pottery making had
not been the only widespread ceramic tradition in Melanesia in prehistoric times. He wondered whether it
would be appropriate, in fact, to think of the peoples of
Melanesia as ‘‘members of a series of overlapping interaction spheres’’ the extent and importance of which had
varied over time and space (Egloff 1975:30). If so, then
‘‘cultural differentiation in island Melanesia should not
be considered simply in terms of migration, settlement
and subsequent isolation with limited interaction, but
as resulting in part from a pattern of interaction which
gave seaborne communities alternative strategies from
which to select’’ (p. 31).
In 1977, at an international conference on prehistoric
trade and exchange held at the Australian Museum in
Sydney, Wal Ambrose cautioned archaeologists about
using ethnographic canoe-borne trading systems in
Melanesia to account for Lapita’s wide geographic distribution in the Pacific. Taking historic patterns of
trade in the Admiralty Islands as his illustration, he explained why he was skeptical that modern systems
were ‘‘abbreviated examples of an earlier more comprehensive trading network which was superimposed on
Melanesian communities by Lapita-making potters
some 3,000 years ago’’ (Ambrose 1978:326). He said that
it was impossible to find any close modern parallels to
the daunting feats of colonization and seafaring of the
Lapita colonists. He forcefully reminded archaeologists
of two important points: historic and protohistoric trading systems in Melanesia vary greatly, and they are social systems, not just ways of moving produce and valuable goods from place to place.
In 1979 Roger Green published a comprehensive review of the archaeology of Lapita pottery sites in the Pacific. His paper was a major attempt to make sense of
geographic—or ‘‘interregional’’—variation within Lapita archaeological assemblages. While he felt that no
clear-cut ancestor for Lapita pottery making had been
found anywhere in Melanesia or Southeast Asia, he argued that Lapita’s more immediate origin—judging
from the known geographic distribution of Lapita
sites—was easier to pin down: ‘‘The hypothesis I advance is that the original Lapita adaptation was to an
area with a complex continental island environment,
which possessed a wide range of resources that related
communities could assemble through exchange. This I
place in the New Britain–New Ireland area, from which
for 700 years communities far to the east obtained obsidian’’ (Green 1979:45).
The theme of Lapita as a regional phenomenon was
further explored by the archaeologist Jean Kennedy in
several influential papers published in the early 1980s
reporting her research in the Admiralty Islands. She
alerted scholars to the importance of understanding archaeological finds not only in their local but also in
their regional contexts (Kennedy 1981, 1982, 1983). As
Ambrose and Green had already done, she drew attention to the striking geographic distribution of Lapita
pottery in the southwestern Pacific, but instead of
focusing on the question of Polynesian origins she emphasized that Lapita had ‘‘a Melanesian distribution
with a Polynesian extension’’ (Kennedy 1982:24). After
weighing arguments for and against the origin of the
Lapita pottery style in Southeast Asia, she made a telling point: not only did we need to learn more about Lapita’s Melanesian context before trying to resolve the
question of its origin but ‘‘we might then see Melanesia
as less a passive recipient of influences than an active
participant in contact with a Southeast Asian world of
islands, also poorly understood.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘the
widespread similarity in incised and relief pottery [then
roughly dated ca. 2,000 b.p. and less] in Melanesia suggested by others and extended by the Admiralties’ data
may signal, as does the distribution of Lapita style, a
complex intercommunicating world’’ (p. 27).
Kennedy illustrated the implications of her suggestions for an understanding of the geography of Pacific
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 163
prehistory by contrasting the Admiralty Islands with
the Fiji Islands, which are located near the eastern limit
of Lapita’s distribution. ‘‘The possibility of greater frequency and diversity of prehistoric contact, much
higher in the Admiralties than in Fiji, suggests a contrast in the local social environments: whereas individual social units in Fiji interact largely amongst themselves in a nearly closed environment, social units in
the Admiralties have other possibilities. They may interact individually in a social environment that is open
to the world outside’’ (1982:27–28).
These examples illustrate that the initial challenges
in archaeology to the 1950s agenda came mostly, although not exclusively (e.g., Suggs 1960:82–85), from
Melanesianists. It might be argued that Melanesianists
had only themselves to blame if they were disenchanted
with the 1950s agenda; maybe Goodenough had been
talking about Oceania at the 1956 AAAS symposium,
but as the companion papers by Sahlins and Goldman
show—and Mead’s introduction to all three in the Journal of the Polynesian Society confirms—everyone else
had been talking about Polynesia. This defense makes
some sense, for it seemed then and still does that the
culture history of Polynesia is much younger and simpler than the culture history of the rest of the Pacific
(Green n.d., 1991, 1992, 1994b). But such a defense has
the effect of relegating Polynesia and the 1950s agenda
to the ranks of the peripheral and odd (see Moore 1994a:
14–15)—a demotion that some are unwilling to accept
(Bellwood 1987, Durham 1992). Nor is everyone willing
to concede that the islands of modern Polynesia, once
their colonization began some 3,000 or so years ago,
were conspicuously different from those of ancient Melanesia and Micronesia in their isolation and marginality.
New Evidence and Analyses
There are good reasons to rethink the intellectual
framework of Pacific anthropology. Classification of
human diversity in the Pacific, for example, into culture areas under headings such as ‘‘Polynesia’’ and
‘‘Melanesia’’ is fundamentally misleading (Green 1991).
Implicit in such classifications is the assumption that
core bundles of traits—in language, customs, and
genes—remain intact over long periods of time and vast
geographic distances. This way of thinking, for example, underlies the belief that Polynesians have always
been Polynesians (or Proto-Polynesians) and their history can be traced back to a primal state sometimes
called Ancestral Polynesian Society (Kirch 1984), which
contained the seeds, blueprint, or Bauplan that predetermined how Polynesian societies would diverge from
one another in the course of their evolution away from
this common ancestor.
We argue here for a different view of geography, time,
and human diversity. Individuals and societies do not
exist in isolation. Language, material culture, and social
customs are resources deployed by people in different
t ab l e 1
Age Estimations for Sites in the Bismarck
Archipelago
Site Name
Matenkupkum, New Ireland
Yombon, New Britain
Buang Merabak, New Ireland
Matenbek, New Ireland
Panakiwuk, New Ireland
Balof, New Ireland
Pamwak, Manus
Misisil, New Britain
Talasea and Mopir, New Britain
Date Range (b.p.)
35,000–10,000
35,000–late Holocene
31,000–late Holocene
20,000–late Holocene
15,000–late Holocene
14,000–late Holocene
,12,000–late Holocene
11,000–late Holocene
20,000 and later
ways under differing circumstances. Over time and
space, therefore, cultural and biological traits combine
and recombine. The past had different human geographies from those that exist today. The archaeological
phenomenon in the Pacific, for example, called the Lapita cultural complex—said by some to be the material
expression of Ancient Polynesian Society—was not just
modern Polynesian culture in embryo. The world in
which this complex was formed was different from any
other.
early voyaging and settlement
Early evidence for humankind in the southwestern Pacific now directly challenges our former sense of prehistoric geography in this part of the world. Southeast
Asia, New Guinea, and Australia used to be treated as
separate theaters of research work. Now it is probable
that these parts need to be seen as elements of a single
whole over much of human time. Homo sapiens was
present in Southeast Asia by about 50,000 years ago. As
Bowdler (1993:65–66; see also Allen 1994, Allen and
Holdaway 1995, Smith and Sharp 1993) has put it,
This fully modern human was probably coastally
adapted and equipped with highly functional watercraft. At a time of lowered sea level, water crossings
of up to 65 km appear to have been negotiated
across Wallacea into Australia and to oceanic islands of Melanesia. . . . Thus we may see mainland
southeast Asia, Wallacea, Melanesia and Australia
colonised virtually simultaneously by modern human beings some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Some of the age estimations (table 1) suggest interesting
possibilities. Nine sites of Pleistocene age are now
known in the Bismarck Archipelago. In an earlier interpretation based on the Matenkupkum site alone, Gosden and Robertson (1991) suggested that the first settlers of New Ireland had probably been strandloopers
who stayed near the coast because of the topography
and the location of vital food resources. New evidence
contradicts this inference. The oldest site now known
164 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
on New Britain is at Yombon in West New Britain Province, ca. 35 km in from the coast at an altitude of 500
m. Here Pavlides and Gosden (1994) have reported dates
of 35,570 6 480 b.p. and 33,600 6 670 b.p. for stone
flaking floors associated with the exploitation of local
outcrops of high-quality chert. These dates, which overlap at two standard deviations, are from identical stratigraphic locations more than 500 m apart. Each date is
stratigraphically below a further Pleistocene date
(32,630 6 400 b.p. in the latter case, 14,310 6 100 b.p.
in the former), and all four dates are contained within
the upper ca. 10 cm of a clay layer which, at both locations, is ca. 150 cm below the present surface. At each
location the dated materials and their associated artifacts, including struck flakes and a single retouched
flake some 10 cm long, were initially sealed by 40 cm
and 60 cm respectively of similar sterile deposits (a consolidated tephra and then clay) and subsequently overlain by a series of Holocene tephras and soils containing
artifacts (Pavlides 1993). The physical circumstances of
these finds, so stratigraphically similar, so well sealed,
and so far apart, offer confirmation of the observed association between the dates and the excavated finds.
Therefore, it is evident that people were exploiting this
chert source by 35,000 b.p. and that prior to that date
people had been exploring the interior of the island.
Matenkupkum on New Ireland is a cave on a terrace
some 15 m above the sea; the site has a basal date of ca.
35,000 b.p. Matenbek is a second cave, some 70 m from
Matenkupkum and on the same terrace, the lowest unit
of which dates to between 20,000 and 18,000 years.
Compared with Matenkupkum, two differences in the
Matenbek Pleistocene layers are quite startling. The
first is that from the very bottom of the site and continuing throughout the Pleistocene, the dominant terrestrial animal present in terms of both NISP (number of
individual specimens) and MNI (minimum number of
individuals) counts is the cuscus, Phalanger orientalis.
This animal, not endemic to New Ireland, is thought to
have been transported there by humans (Allen and
White 1989:137; Allen, Gosden, and White 1989; Flannery and White 1991). The Matenbek phalanger bones
are currently the earliest evidence for the occurrence of
this species in the Bismarcks. The second difference,
again continuing from the bottom of Matenbek through
the Pleistocene layers, is the small but persistent presence of obsidian. In all, 37 pieces of obsidian were recovered from the Pleistocene layers of the test pit, of which
17 have been sourced using the PIXE-PIGME technique
(Summerhayes and Allen 1993). Slightly more than
70% derive from the New Britain source of Mopir and
the remainder from sources in the nearby Talasea area
of the same island. The site is far from the obsidian
sources—350 km in a straight line, including a 30-km
water crossing.
Another site which adds materially to our knowledge
of Pleistocene island occupation is Pamwak on Manus
Island. The earliest date from Pamwak is 12,000 b.p.,
but this is only from part-way down the stratigraphic
sequence. It is likely that Manus was settled well before
this date, and 20,000 b.p. or earlier is the estimate given
by the excavators (Fredericksen, Spriggs, and Ambrose
1993:149). The lowest layer (7) has mainly unmodified
chert flakes, using local raw material. A similar pattern
is found in layers 6 and 5, although the latter (dated to
12,400 6 80 b.p. [ANU 6980]) also sees the first local
occurrence of obsidian. Other important first occurrences at this time are the bandicoot (Echymipera kalubu) and the Pacific almond, Canarium sp. Both of
these may have been human introductions from mainland New Guinea, although the possibly poorer preservational conditions lower in the site could account for
their earlier absence. Further important changes occur
in layer 4, dated by six estimations to around 11,000 b.p.
Here obsidian occurs in large amounts for the first time
(Fredericksen, Spriggs, and Ambrose 1993: table 1). It is
accompanied by a range of formal tools made on stone
and shell including edge-ground shell adzes and ground
stone axes or adzes, the earliest shell implements or
ground stone reported from New Guinea. The Pamwak
data indicate that elements of life in the Pacific, such
as shell implements and tree cropping, have Pleistocene
roots (Gosden 1995).
Recent archaeological discoveries ‘‘strongly suggest
that some form(s) of inter-island trade or exchange in
stone and other materials have an antiquity in Melanesia extending back at least 20,000 years’’ (Kirch
1991a:146; see also Allen 1991:5–6). Pleistocene populations in the Pacific did not get lost in the jungle after
the human colonization of New Guinea and island Melanesia (Terrell n.d.b). It would be surprising if they had,
for anyone with a canoe should have found no insurmountable barriers to movement east and west anywhere between Southeast Asia and the Solomons. The
archaeologist and yachtsman Geoff Irwin argues that
New Guinea and most of the islands of Melanesia, in
fact, are part of an easy ‘‘voyaging corridor’’ (fig. 1) that
stretches between Southeast Asia and the Solomons (Irwin 1991; 1992:5–6, 19; Irwin, Bickler, and Quirke
1990). He characterizes this corridor as containing an
immense chain of intervisible islands that are sheltered
equatorially between northern and southern bands of
summer cyclones and subject to seasonal (monsoonal)
reversals of currents and winds. He thinks that these
circumstances made this part of Oceania a voyaging
‘‘nursery’’ in ancient times in which people were able
to learn the art of sailing offshore with the security that
there were lots of islands behind them to serve as a
safety net if anything went amiss (Irwin, Bickler, and
Quirke 1990:38–39).
Islands east of the Solomons—in the part of the Pacific that Andrew Pawley and Roger Green have labeled
‘‘Remote Oceania’’ (Pawley and Green 1973)—are often
farther apart and smaller than islands nearer Asia, New
Guinea, and Australia, those in Pawley and Green’s
‘‘Near Oceania.’’ Irwin thinks that voyaging conditions
among the islands of Remote Oceania must have been
different enough for people experienced in traveling
around Near Oceania that their discovery and settlement had to wait until people had learned how to sail
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 165
F i g. 1. ‘‘A Pleistocene ‘voyaging corridor’ connected Asia and Melanesia with chains of large intervisible
islands, seasonal reversals of wind and current and a sheltered equatorial position between northern and
southern cyclone belts’’ (Irwin, Bickler, and Quirke 1990:35, fig. 1).
offshore and survive. But he sees these differences in geography and the recency of first settlement as evidence
against the idea that the inhabitants of Remote Oceania
have always lived isolated lives. While thousands of
years evidently passed between the settlement of Near
Oceania and the first long voyages to Remote Oceania,
Irwin considers it unlikely that, once deep-sea colonization started sometime after 3,500 b.p. and culture traits
rapidly spread from the Bismarck Archipelago to Fiji,
Tonga, and Samoa, people in Remote Oceania got lost
to one another. Said differently, connections among the
Polynesian islands at the beginning of their own prehistory must have been more numerous and more intimate
than the ties reported by foreign explorers and colonists
at the beginning of historic times in the 18th century.
One conclusion would seem obvious: that instead of
isolation’s causing the Polynesians’ cultural diversification, or ‘‘radiation,’’ cultural differentiation among
the Polynesians (largely for other reasons) in time may
have led to their social and cultural isolation in space.
Truth, however, may also lie somewhere between these
two extremes. Irwin, for instance, argues (1992: chap. 9)
that voyaging declined among islands in Remote Oceania as a function of their accessibility to one another—
that is, prehistoric interaction spheres contracted over
time according to how accessible the islands were to
one another (see Irwin 1992:fig. 67).
In summary, it is a commonplace that New Guinea,
Australia, and Tasmania formed a single geographic
landmass, sometimes called Sahul or Greater Australia,
in the late Pleistocene (Allen 1993, Allen, Gosden, and
White 1989). By analogy, Irwin’s voyaging corridor
might be said to have once formed a single geographic
‘‘seamass’’ not only in the Pleistocene but afterwards,
too. This new understanding of prehistoric geography in
the Pacific challenges old assumptions about human
isolation and interaction in this island world. As we
have seen, scholars used to accept without question
that (1) the first Papuan-speakers reached the Pacific
well before the ancestors of the Polynesians; (2) in the
Pacific, these colonists had little or no contact with
people in Southeast Asia; (3) eventually, however, new
immigrants from the west broke through the remoteness of New Guinea and island Melanesia and—directly
through intermarriage or indirectly through cultural
diffusion—brought the Austronesian languages to
much of island Melanesia and some parts of coastal
New Guinea (see Bellwood 1978b:45–56; 1991; 1993;
Gosden et al. 1989:561; Hagelberg and Clegg 1993;
Kirch 1987, 1988, 1991a; Shutler and Marck 1975;
White 1979:373–74). This synopsis highlights the critical role played by ‘‘the essential isolation of the Melane-
166 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
sian world’’ (Golson 1982:21) in older conceptions of Pacific prehistory (see Bellwood 1978b:46–48; Spriggs
1989:608). For reasons that have never been adequately
stated—and that make little apparent sense if one looks
at a map—it has been normal to write about New
Guinea (the second-largest island in the world) and the
rest of Near Oceania as a kind of lost world that had to
be rediscovered by Malayo-Polynesians from Southeast
Asia in a fashion comparable, it would seem, to the discovery of the Polynesians by European explorers in the
18th century or the truly belated discovery of people in
the highlands of New Guinea by white men as recently
as the 1930s.
These points, therefore, need to be stressed about the
temporal geography of Pacific prehistory:
1. People in Pleistocene times who had suitable watercraft would have encountered no obvious physical
barriers to voyaging between Southeast Asia and most
of Melanesia. Some today would even say that the settlement of the southwestern Pacific was ‘‘a fairly predictable result’’ once seagoing rafts were ‘‘in the hands
of human populations of a modern type’’ (Green 1991:
497).
2. Getting to Near Oceania, in fact, must have been
reasonably easy, for people had already succeeded in doing so 40,000 to 45,000 or more years ago (Allen 1994;
Allen and Holdaway 1995; Gosden 1993; Green 1991:
496–97).
3. The edge of this island world until about 3,000–
3,500 years ago lay not to the west of New Guinea—
that is, not between Southeast Asia and Melanesia—
but instead to the east, somewhere between the
Solomons and the Fijis (Butler 1994, Green 1991,
Spriggs 1993, Terrell 1989).
4. Prehistoric voyaging among the Polynesian islands
was more extensive, more frequent, and more intimate
than the kinds of voyaging patterns reported by foreigners at the beginning of historic times.
a community of culture
David Schneider often argued that kinship, like totemism, the matrilineal complex, and matriarchy, was a
nonsubject (Schneider 1972, 1984). Yet ideas about kinship, kin-based societies, the idiom of kinship, and the
importance of kinship are the received wisdom of anthropology. As Schneider said, ‘‘This wisdom is entrenched in our thinking and especially in our theory,
which derives closely from our own cultural notions.
These are very compelling ideas, for the doctrines seem
self-evident, as well they should if they are essentially
our own cultural conceptions’’ (1984:3). For much of
this century, anthropologists accepted without hesitation the methodological directive to chart social, political, and economic relationships in primitive societies
through the study of kinship (Kuper 1988). In Schneider’s phrasing, kinship was seen as the first ordering
principle, the genealogical grid, of life in simple societies (Schneider 1972; 1984:174–76, 200; also Bouquet
1996). and whole theories of social and cultural evolu-
tion were based on this elementary principle (e.g., Sahlins 1968; Service 1971, 1975).
A similar premise lay at the heart of the 1950s
agenda. It was received wisdom that language, like kinship, could be used to map human history and chart the
genealogy not of individuals and families but of societies.4 This conventional wisdom took it for granted that
(1) language was a reliable guide to cultural ethnicity
and\human biology (Stoneking et al. 1990), (2) linguistic
relationships between ‘‘ethnolinguistic populations’’
(Welsch, Terrell, and Nadolski 1992:587–90)—like kinship relationships within primitive societies—were the
genealogical grid of culture history (Mace and Pagel
1994;554), and, (3) therefore, historical linguistics could
be used to chart the ‘‘cultural phylogeny’’ of human
groups since, as Mace and Pagel (1994:557) have summarized the argument, ‘‘if there are no other clues to
phylogeny, language at least is always known.’’
This nested set of ideas, as Mace and Pagel make
clear, is still acceptable to many scholars (Moore
1994a,b). Ethnographic realities, unfortunately, do not
necessarily conform to logical premises. Social anthropologists working in Melanesia and Micronesia, in particular, have had to abandon such neatness of thought.
What Mace and Pagel call the ‘‘phylogenetic approach’’
presupposes ‘‘that cultures are real, that they persist
through time, and that they occasionally give rise to
daughter cultures’’ (Mace and Pagel 1994:563). While
they acknowledge that covariation of language, culture,
and biology may not be perfect because of populations’
interbreeding and the horizontal transmission (e.g., between neighbors) of cultural elements, they do not
doubt the wisdom of the phylogenetic approach. ‘‘We
shall have to accept, then, that a cultural phylogeny represents only broadly the cultural path that most of the
ancestors of the majority of members of the culture followed’’ (p. 552). Others now see, however, that the qualifications they note are far more serious—that the history of languages may tell us less about the history of
the people speaking those languages than has been believed (Terrell 1988, n.d. c; Terrell and Stewart 1996).
Fieldwork more than theory has led many social anthropologists in the Pacific to this conclusion. In the
1950s, A. Kimball Romney wrote in a celebrated paper
that ‘‘the genetic [i.e., phylogenetic] model takes as its
segment of cultural history a group of tribes which are
set off from all other groups by sharing a common physical type, possessing common systematic patterns, and
speaking genetically related languages’’ (Romney 1957:
36). The correspondence between language, physical
type, and cultural patterns implied by this statement
has often been taken for granted in the Pacific on the
ground that isolation is ‘‘the key factor which renders
4. Language differences are commonly used in anthropology and
government service (see Filer 1990:116) to ‘‘separate’’ and ‘‘index’’
people as ‘‘belonging to’’ or ‘‘coming from’’ different societies or
ethnic backgrounds. In practice this has often meant in the Pacific
drawing a line on a map around villages reportedly speaking ‘‘the
same language’’ and thereafter calling all these villages an ‘‘ethnolinguistic population.’’
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 167
oceanic islands ideal theaters for phylogenetic studies’’
(Kirch and Green 1987:440; also Moore 1994a: 12, 14–
15). But by the 1960s the pace of ethnographic research
in the Pacific had begun to overwhelm this anthropological common sense (Filer 1990).
For example, James Watson’s micro-evolution study
in the Kainantu Subdistrict of the Eastern Highlands of
New Guinea began explicitly in 1959 as a comparative
study of ‘‘the languages, cultures, psychological traits,
racial characteristics, and ecological adaptations’’ of
four peoples (Watson 1963:189):
Since the four study peoples speak cognate languages, we tentatively postulated that they might in
other respects, such as race and culture, also be
modern derivatives of a single community or original population. That is, the study peoples and those
related to them might have a common origin in the
past, reflected in each of the several orders of variation it was proposed to study. Stated most generally, our central question asked by what means, to
what degree, and in what directions the original
group, or Urstamm, had diversified to produce the
four modern peoples.
The project ultimately found, however, that these
‘‘groups-on-the-ground, their composition, and the immediate social attributes of their membership’’ could
not be captured analytically by static descriptions of
separate cultures. As Watson wrote in 1970, the only
successful way to approach these societies was to recognize ‘‘that a social system organizes a flow of personnel
in space and time’’ (Watson 1970:108).
During a retrospective symposium on Watson’s project in 1994, Donald Tuzin reflected on its successes and
failures: ‘‘Whether their origins are common or disparate, when small-scale societies engage in frequent interaction, a regional dynamic emerges’’ (Tuzin 1994). At
the same symposium, Paula Brown Glick added: ‘‘It
seems to me that the basic assumption that distinct cultural groups [in a region] can be compared as units seriously contends with observations of internal variation,
findings of movements of people between groups, constant change, and instability of groups’’ (Glick 1994).
This example illustrates why many anthropologists
working in the Pacific now distrust the wisdom and feasibility of reconstructing ‘‘cultural phylogenies.’’ In
Tuzin’s words, the greatest weakness of Watson’s project occurred where the methodological ground, when it
began, seemed the most solid, the presumptive Urstamm: ‘‘Then, as now, the idea of common ancestry
immediately invites the meta-language and concepts of
biological evolution. Descent, linearity, divergence, adaptation, diversification, speciation, taxonomy and
temporality—these were the Project’s intellectual apparatus, diverting it from perspectives and processes that
were subsequently recognized by Melanesianists working elsewhere to have major methodological importance’’ (Tuzin 1994).
Thomas Harding recently observed that the social
phenomenon or process called ‘‘trade’’ or ‘‘exchange’’
was a prominent characteristic of precontact Melanesian communities generally and contributed to the interdependence of people on a far wider scale than one
might suppose given the ethnolinguistic diversity of
Melanesian societies (Harding 1994). Some of the details of this diversity on the north coast of New Guinea,
for instance, are impressive. Sixty languages, belonging
to 24 different language families, are spoken today along
the 700 km of coastline between Jayapura in modern Irian Jaya and Madang in Papua New Guinea. These
many languages are assigned by linguists to at least five
unrelated language phyla—Austronesian and at least
four non-Austronesian, or ‘‘Papuan,’’ phyla (Foley 1986,
Laycock 1973, Ross 1988, Wurm 1982, Wurm and Hattori 1981, and see Filer 1990). In spite of such diversity,
Melanesia is renowned in the anthropological literature
(Kirch 1990, Sillitoe 1978) for the intricacy and scale of
the integration of local communities into larger spheres
of interaction and regional exchange networks, for example, the famous kula network in the Massim, hiri
trade on the Papuan coast, and the trading system described by Harding (1967) for the Vitiaz Strait. Societies
in the Sepik region, for example, ‘‘engage in an import
and export of ritual and artistic culture that reaches intensities almost unparalleled in the nonindustrial
world’’ (Roscoe 1989b:219; also Mead 1967, Tuzin
1990).
The A. B. Lewis Collection at the Field Museum in
Chicago is one of the largest and best-documented ethnographic collections ever obtained in the southwestern Pacific by a single field researcher. This collection,
which was assembled by Albert B. Lewis (1867–1940)
during the 1909–13 Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition, provides a cultural benchmark for New Guinea
and island Melanesia at the turn of the century (Welsch
n.d.a, c). Since 1987, a continuing research program directed by Terrell and Robert L. Welsch, which is combining museum-based investigations with fieldwork on
the Sepik coast of New Guinea in West Sepik (Sandaun)
Province, has dramatically and unexpectedly reaffirmed
how little correspondence there can be in the Pacific between language diversity and cultural variation.
Welsh and Terrell have found that most of the variability in inventories (or assemblages) of material culture from different villages on the Sepik coast is associated not with differences in the culture histories of
these communities, as suggested by their linguistic relationships, but rather with differences in intervillage
communication, trade, and cultural diffusion (Welsch
n.d.a, d; Welsch, Terrell, and Nadolski 1992; Welsch
and Terrell 1994, n.d.). Ethnographically, the coast is
not an enclave of small, isolated communities; on the
contrary, people there participate in an involved network of relationships that some would gloss as exchange partnerships but which they think can be more
accurately described—as people on the north coast do—
as intergenerationally inherited friendships (Welsch and
Terrell 1994, n.d.; see also Harding 1967:165–84; Sillitoe 1978). The complex infrastructure maintained by
168 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
the institution of inherited friendships still unites villages on the coast into a resilient community of culture,
a multiethnic configuration that might even be called a
polity without (in pre-European times) an overarching
political authority or governmental central place.
In 1993 Terrell and Welsch found that elaborate
styles of prehistoric pottery are an obvious and abundant feature of the local archaeological record on the
Sepik coast. This was not a new discovery. Pamela Swadling and Paul Gorecki have been arguing for some
time, in fact, that pottery making in Irwin’s voyaging
corridor linking island Southeast Asia with northern
New Guinea may be 5,000–6,000 years old (Gorecki
1992, Gorecki, Mabin, and Campbell 1991, Swadling
n.d., Swadling et al. 1989, Swadling, Araho, and Ivuyo
1991, Swadling and Hope 1992). Obsidian flakes, cores,
and small tools are also common on all of the islands
Terrell and Welsch surveyed near Wewak and Aitape
and in some locations on the mainland. Sourcing of 45
obsidian samples done by Glenn Summerhayes in the
laboratories of the Australian Nuclear Science and
Technology Organization at Lucas Heights, Australia,
using PIXE-PIGME analyses, has revealed that the obsidian comes from sources in the Bismarck Archipelago: from the Kutau source on the Talasea Peninsula
of New Britain and from Pam Lin (Pam Island) as well
as Umrei and Wekwok (Lou Island) in the Admiralty Islands.
Terrell and Welsch now hypothesize that trade
among communities in the Bismarck Archipelago and
on the Sepik coast is older than pottery making in either
area—that the trade and communication among communities on the coast observed in historic times are not
recent phenomena. They suspect that the earliest pottery-making industries on the Sepik coast were local expressions of a widely distributed style of ceramics in the
voyaging corridor marked—roughly speaking—by the
presence of plain and red-slipped globular pots. Over
time, however, the initial widespread commonalities of
pottery making in the western Pacific appear to have
given rise to distinctive local traditions in the Vanimo,
Serra, Aitape, Wewak, and Bismarck areas. Continuity
over time in some pottery traits together with evidence
of pottery trade between these areas suggests, however,
that trade and communication continued to take place
among established communities on the coast even
while these distinctive local ceramic traditions were developing. In other words, variation in pottery making—
like linguistic variation—masks widespread continuities on the north coast of New Guinea in other cultural
domains (Terrell n.d. b).
The complex infrastructure maintained on the Sepik
coast by the institution of intergenerationally inherited
friendships is an empirical example of what Lesser
(1961:43) called a social field of ‘‘structured friendships.’’ This interaction sphere can be likened to a large
playing field with many groups of players, many different languages, and several different local environments,
each with its own economic possibilities. The metaphor of a playing field is apt, since people living on the
coast, as in most sporting events, share an agreed-upon
set of basic rules, expectations, and organizing principles (Terrell 1988, Welsch and Terrell n.d.).
There are some (Bellwood 1995, Green 1995, Kirch
1995) who say that the poor correlation between language history and cultural diversity on the Sepik coast
is unusual and that language relationships can be used
accurately elsewhere in the Pacific to map ethnic diversity and culture history. It is certainly true that the institution of inherited friendships is not the only way in
which people in the Pacific are linked with one another
‘‘at a distance’’ (Strathern and Stürzenhofecker 1994,
Terrell and Welsch n.d.), but it now seems that the poor
fit between language phylogeny and culture found on
the Sepik coast holds true even for Polynesia.
polynesia
In 1956 Goodenough observed that under normal conditions it is difficult to explore culture change within the
framework of what biological evolutionists have called
radiation. For most places on the earth, ‘‘we can relate
languages, to be sure, but we cannot be sure of the phylogenetic significance of differences and similarities in
other aspects of culture among linguistically related societies. They may be due to the effect of differential borrowing from other unrelated cultures or to the levelling
effect of internal borrowing among themselves’’ (1957:
146). Thus Pacific specialists, he said, were in a fortunate, enviable position. As Patrick Kirch later rephrased
Goodenough’s thesis, ‘‘There are probably few areas in
the world where the potential for studying the growth
and development of complex, stratified social and political systems is as great as among the islands of Polynesia. In part, the analytical advantages of Polynesia are
due to the often-cited ‘laboratory-like’ conditions that
isolated islands naturally provide’’ (Kirch 1984: ix).
These laboratory-like conditions have encouraged a
number of scholars to look for the sequence in which
the various Polynesian languages branched off their
common family tree (fig. 2) in the hope of determining
thereby the sequence in which people colonized the
many islands and archipelagoes in the Pacific east of the
Solomons (e.g., Churchill 1911; Elbert 1953; Emory
1946, 1963; Green 1966). But in 1972, the linguist Bruce
Biggs at the University of Auckland looked closely at
the implications of thinking that the Polynesian languages can be mapped, or ‘‘subgrouped,’’ as a family tree
to reconstruct the ancient settlement history of Polynesia. He cautioned that human migrations cannot be determined directly and unambiguously by linguistic subgrouping (Biggs 1972:149):
Any simplistic view of Polynesian settlement passing from A to B to C in a sequence which never retraces its steps will be false. It seems likely that as
more detailed research is completed in the various
fields which contribute to our knowledge of Polynesian prehistory, we will have to substitute for
long-discarded theories of successive migrations
into Polynesia, a theory of multiple intra-Polynesian
migration and settlement.
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 169
F i g. 2. A family tree for the languages of Polynesia (after Green 1966: table 9).
Biggs counseled that in cases where contract between
societies has been either sufficiently minor or sufficiently major, culture contact may be linguistically undetectable (p. 150).
These cautions were in keeping with what linguists
have long known. As Bloomfield wrote, ‘‘earlier students of Indo-European did not realize that the familytree diagram was merely a statement of their method;
they accepted the uniform parent languages and their
sudden and clear-cut splitting, as historical realities’’
(1933:311, emphasis added). In a landmark paper, Roger
Green (1981) illustrated how such cautions must be
heeded in Polynesia. Archaeological evidence, he wrote,
showed that the archipelagoes of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa
in western Polynesia were probably the first areas of
Polynesia colonized by humankind. Green noted that
scholars had initially thought the order in which these
archipelagoes had been settled would have paralleled
the branching order in which the Fijian, Tongan, and Samoan languages follow one another on the Polynesian
family tree (e.g., Suggs 1960, Groube 1971). Archaeological evidence indicated, however, that the entire FijiTonga-Samoa region had been settled rapidly by people
making Lapita pottery, and they apparently kept in
touch with one another even while they were diverging
from each other—linguistically and culturally—into
‘‘Fijians,’’ ‘‘Tongans,’’ and ‘‘Samoans’’ (see also Davidson 1977, Geraghty 1983, Hunt 1987, Irwin 1980, Pawley 1979).
The islands of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa are relatively
close to one another. Need the same cautions be listened to farther out in the central and eastern Pacific,
where far greater distances of open sea must be navi-
gated to sail from archipelago to archipelago? Or were
the Society Islands, the Marquesas, Hawai’i, the Cook
Islands, New Zealand, and the like colonized in the order suggested by the branching of Tahitian, Marquesan,
Hawaiian, and so on, off the Polynesian family tree?
Were Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians, and so on, sufficiently isolated from one another that similarities and
differences in customs and material culture in central
and eastern Polynesia can be charted by language relationships?
For example, it has often been said—on the basis of
their position on the Polynesian language family tree—
that the first Hawaiians must have come from the Marquesas. However, scholars are now discovering that it is
difficult to derive Hawaiian language and culture from a
single ‘‘homeland’’ (source) island or archipelago, Marquesan or other (Hunt 1994, n.d). Instead, information
drawn from archaeology, human biology, oral traditions, and even linguistics suggests a much more complicated picture of Hawaiian history. Current research
by Michael Pietrusewsky (n.d.) on Polynesian skeletal
biology indicates that Hawaiians are closely related to
other island populations in eastern Polynesia, particularly Marquesans. Blood-group frequency data analyzed
by Matisoo-Smith (1991) link Hawaiians with other
Polynesian populations in a number of ways. Two of her
statistical analyses, based on the same data set but using different computational algorithms, place Hawaiians in a close relationship with populations in the
southern Cook Islands. Using another data set, two
other analyses put Hawaiians with Easter Islanders.
These differing results illustrate how estimating biological affinities in different ways leads to a variety of
170 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
likely historical connections among Polynesian populations. It is conceivable that only one of these connections is historically accurate; however, it is also possible that biological similarities and differences among
Polynesians are difficult to sort out because there was
continuing voyaging and settlement among these populations after the initial settlement of Polynesia. Hawaiians, as our case in point, may have close relatives in
many places, not just one or two.
Here the language evidence is instructive. When
shared cognates (determined using standard word lists)
are assessed, Hawaiian shows marked agreement with
other Polynesian languages, particularly those in eastern Polynesia. Biggs (1978) and Dyen (1981) found that
the highest cognate score for Hawaiian was with Rarotongan (64%); in another study (Dyen, as reported by
Kirk and Epling 1972), the highest score was with
Mangarevan (86%). Similarly ambiguous results can be
derived by looking for uniquely shared innovations—
the kind of linguistic evidence primarily used by historical linguists for subgrouping languages into family
trees. According to Emory’s (1946, 1963) original determinations, Hawaiian shares 80 unique lexical items
with Marquesan, 72 with Tahitian, and 41 with Mangarevan. Emory’s counts, however, appear to include
shared retentions as well as innovations. In a more recent study of Hawaiian and Marquesan, Elbert (1982)
could identify only 30 lexical items uniquely shared by
these two language traditions; six of them had been carried from Hawai’i to the Marquesas in the 19th century
by Christian missionaries.
Bruce Biggs (1994) has provided computer-generated
information on the ties between New Zealand Maori
and other eastern Polynesian languages derived from
the massive Polynesian lexicon (POLLEX) database he
has assembled at the University of Auckland. He reports the following uniquely shared lexical innovations
for five language pairs: Maori-Rarotongan, 29; MaoriTahitian, 18; Maori-Hawaiian, 46; Tahitian-Hawaiian,
24; and Rarotongan-Tahitian, 55. Roger Green (personal
communication, 1995; Hunt n.d.) reports that Hawaiian
and Marquesan share innovations comparable in number to Biggs’s Tahitian-Hawaiian estimate of 24. Thus
while Emory’s original counts appeared to link Hawaiian most directly with Marquesan, today there is no particular reason to favor Marquesan or any other single
speech tradition in eastern Polynesia as Hawaiian’s
closest relative. If anything, the link between Hawaiian
and Maori hints that we must rethink how language
evidence is used to infer patterns of historical relatedness in the Pacific.
Starting in the 1960s, Emory and Yosihiko Sinoto
(Emory, Bonk, and Sinoto 1968, Sinoto 1968) began
looking at prehistoric artifacts at the Bishop Museum
from different parts of eastern Polynesia to see if connections based on material culture matched those based
on language evidence. They discovered that the Society
Islands, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and New
Zealand all had strikingly similar kinds of artifacts.
They inferred from this evidence that there had once
been a widely shared cultural horizon in the eastern Pacific around a.d. 800–1200 that they labeled ‘‘Archaic
East Polynesian’’ (see Kirch 1986c, Spriggs and Anderson 1993).
Melinda Allen (1996) has completed the most detailed study so far attempted of stylistic and functional
variability in fishhooks from eastern Polynesia. She
finds that between the 14th and the 15th century a.d.
fishhooks from the Cook Islands, Hawai’i, and the Society Islands shared formal similarities (in line attachment devices). Other recent work has documented the
extensive movement of finished adzes and other materials. For example, Weisler (1993, 1994) has shown that
fine-grained basalt adzes, pearl shell, volcanic oven
stones, and volcanic glass were transported from place
to place in an interaction sphere including Henderson,
Pitcairn, and Mangareva in the remote southeastern Pacific over a period a few centuries long that appears to
have ended around a.d. 1500. Allen and Johnson (1994)
show that Aitutaki in the southern Cooks received basalt adzes probably originating in Samoa (Tataga-Matau,
Tutuila, American Samoa), the Society Islands, and
other not yet identified sources from ca. a.d. 1000 into
the 13th century but perhaps continuing into protohistoric times (Allen and Johnson 1994, Buck 1944). Kirch
et al. (1995) document a similar pattern for Mangaia in
the southern Cook Islands. Tataga-Matau basalt from
Tutuila has been identified as the source of polished
adze flakes recovered on Mangaia from an archaeological context dating to a.d. 1000–1500. Other studies
have documented the movement of fine-grained basalt
(often as finished adzes) from Tataga-Matau not only to
the southern Cooks but also to nearby Ofu Island in Manu’a, eastern Samoa (Weisler 1993), Pukapuka in the
northern Cook Islands, Tokelau, Tuvalu, Tonga, the
Lau Islands of Fiji, and the eastern Solomons (Best et al.
1992). Best and his colleagues suggest that long-distance
transport of Tataga-Matau adzes to places beyond
Samoa has been going on for the past 900 years or more.
An innovative study by Kehaunani Cachola-Abad
(1993) has taken another look at what Hawaiian oral
traditions have to say about voyaging and cultural contact in the eastern Pacific. Cachola-Abad finds that
overseas voyaging and the introduction of foreign ideas
are commonly noted events in Hawaiian traditional history. In a preliminary analysis, she has identified 59
named individuals—including chiefs, migrants, and visitors—who are said to have traveled to and from
Hawai’i in prehistoric times. The people mentioned are
often credited with bringing back important ideas or
items (e.g., breadfruit) to Hawai’i from places said to be
‘‘to the south.’’ Among the place names mentioned are
’Upolu, Nu’uhiwa, Bolabola, and Ra’iatea.
Therefore, as Biggs insisted more than 20 years ago,
the view of Polynesian settlement passing from A to B
to C in an irreversible sequence is simplistic. Archaeology, human biology, linguistics, and oral traditions support a different story. Even the far-flung island populations of eastern Polynesia were not isolated from one
another. Patterns of diversity in language, material cul-
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 171
ture, and customs may have more to say about how people stayed in touch with one another than about where
the first settlers of Hawai’i, for example, ‘‘came from.’’
It should be added that a number of people in the Pacific have now successfully completed experimental
canoe voyages using traditional skills and replicated
vessel types. This innovative research has further undermined the presumption that the islands of Polynesia
could have been colonized only by one-way voyages
that led to cultural isolation rather than continued social contact. Finney (1994:262) observes that as long as
voyaging was seen by Westerners as unusually dangerous and difficult, it was easy to think that Polynesians
could only have migrated from A to B to C without being able to retrace their steps safely, deliberately, and
often. But as the famous voyages of the Hokule’a, for
example, have illustrated, this impression is now difficult to justify. As Finney says, we must rethink the
scale of human geography in Polynesia, for ‘‘there
would appear to have been no insurmountable barriers
to widespread interarchipelagos’’ (1994:305).
If so, then as Hunt (1987:330) has inferred from analyses of Fijian language variation ‘‘patterns of similarity
(including linguistic, biological, and cultural traits) may
most accurately reflect, to varying degrees, the latest
events or episodes of human interaction—not simply
the original suite of traits.’’ As Irwin has expressed the
same idea, ‘‘some of the signs that prehistorians have
used to track the path of Polynesian expansion may actually belong to a later time’’ (1992:203). It is possible,
in fact, that the cultural divergence of eastern Polynesian societies—their cultural ‘‘radiation’’ in Goodenough’s terms—may date back only a few centuries
before European contact (Irwin 1992:203).
human biology
One of the most enduring ideas in Pacific scholarship is
the belief that Polynesians and Melanesians are peoples,
or races, with separate origins in time and space (e.g.,
Buck 1938:41–42; Hagelberg and Clegg 1993). Yet most
commentators since World War II have acknowledged
that Polynesians and Melanesians have much in common. The Polynesian languages, after all, are a subgroup
of the Austronesian languages of Melanesia (Pawley and
Ross 1993), and while Polynesians are usually said to be
a reasonably homogeneous people, it is recognized by
scholars that the word ‘‘Melanesian’’ embraces populations that are strikingly diverse in physical appearance,
language, and culture (Golson 1972b; Green 1967, 1991;
Ross n.d.). Nevertheless, Polynesians and Melanesians
have always looked different to many foreign observers,
and many commentators have concluded that Polynesians and Melanesians must have divergent histories,
separate cultural roots, and different biological origins
(e.g., Bellwood 1975:13–14; 1978b: 24–25; 1979:19;
1980:152–53; Buck 1938; Howells 1979:283–84; 1987).
Polynesians have always attracted more attention
and historical speculation than Melanesians. Since the
18th century and the days of European exploration in
the Pacific, ‘‘the intriguing and complicated question’’
(Handy 1930:3) of Polynesian origins has been resolved
in numerous ways by numerous writers. The most popular answers to the mystery of their origins have usually had the following basic elements: Dark-skinned
immigrants are said to have arrived first in the Pacific,
the ancestors of the lighter-skinned Polynesians arriving much later from somewhere to the west of New
Guinea (India, Asia, or the Philippines and Indonesia).
The former were the ancestors of modern Melanesians;
they got no farther than the limits of Melanesia. The
latter had both the maritime technology and the social
forms needed to sail to more distant horizons, and it fell
to them to conquer the remote Pacific beyond the
reaches of Melanesia (Buck 1938, Bellwood 1978b).
In other words, as the archaeologist Jack Golson once
candidly phrased it, ‘‘the so-called Polynesian problem’’
has long been ‘‘how to get the linguistically and culturally homogeneous Polynesians into the central Pacific
without racial contamination from the more diversified
and presumed longer established Melanesians to the
west’’ (Golson 1972c: 19). Even the few who have
argued that dark-skinned Melanesians and lighterskinned Polynesians have a common heritage and origin have usually put the earliest Melanesians in the Pacific ahead of the Polynesians (see the remarks above on
Goodenough’s position in 1956 and Brown 1972[1910]:
15–17; Suggs 1960:32–33, 72). And most people have
assumed that the dark-skinned inhabitants of island
Melanesia and coastal New Guinea who—like Polynesians—speak Austronesian languages must be people of
mixed ancestry, that is, they must be the result of ‘‘the
coming into contact, along the entire gamut of relationships which that phrase allows’’ (Golson 1982:20), of
the aboriginal Melanesian settlers of New Guinea and
nearby islands (places where many of their direct descendants still speak their aboriginal Papuan, i.e., nonAustronesian, languages) with later Austronesianspeaking migrants, a people or peoples best exemplified
these days by the Polynesians of the central and eastern
Pacific (e.g., Bellwood and Koon 1989; Buck 1965[1933];
Clark and Kelly 1993; Golson 1972b, c; Handy 1930:13;
Howells 1987; Lewis 1932:8–9; Shutler and Shutler
1967; Spriggs 1994:73–74; Suggs 1960:31–32, 65–72).
Not everyone has accepted this uncomplicated reading of Pacific prehistory. Some have insisted that the
immediate homeland of the Polynesians must have
been somewhere in Melanesia, not Asia (Goodenough
1957; Green 1967, 1968; Houghton 1980; Terrell 1986a).
But until lately, this view has been the minority position because most have felt, as W. W. Howells once
phrased the position, that the biological evidence ‘‘demands that the pre-Polynesians had no important gene
exchange with Melanesians before or enroute to their
colonization of Polynesia proper’’ (Howells 1979:283).
In recent years, biologists perhaps more than others
have been the most insistent advocates of this uncomplicated story (e.g., Chen et al. 1992, Hill and Serjeantson 1989). Diamond (1996:85) has even written that
when Polynesians finally got to Hawai’i and New
172 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
Zealand ‘‘ancient China’s occupation of the Pacific was
complete.’’ Such statements may only indicate that biologists (e.g., Hagelberg and Clegg 1993:163–64, 168;
Hill, O’Shaughnessy, and Clegg 1989:275–76; see
Marks 1994) are misreading what others have been writing about Pacific prehistory. Positing separate waves of
migration is not the only way to account for biological
differences between inland, coastal, and island peoples
in the Pacific (Howells 1987), and, as far as we know,
no one has ever suggested that Polynesia was colonized
from Australia or the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Kevin Kelly says, however, that another explanation is
likely. Biologists working in the Pacific have been misled by their ‘‘very evident reliance on typological thinking’’ and ‘‘the fallacy of seeing the Polynesian as the
main line of evolution in the Pacific’’ (Kelly n.d).
Whatever the reason, few anticipated that rapid developments in molecular biology—notably techniques
of assaying nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA
(mtDNA)—would uncover the significant presence of
‘‘Melanesia markers’’ in the ‘‘Polynesian’’ gene pool
(e.g., Hagelberg 1994, Hagelberg and Clegg 1993, Hill,
O’Shaughnessy, and Clegg 1989, Lum et al. 1994). As
Kelly concludes, ‘‘the most parsimonious interpretation
of the genetic data is that the Polynesians were derived
from Austronesian-speaking paleopopulations of Melanesian Near Oceania’’ (Kelly n.d.; see also Green 1967).
Contrary to what Howells (1973:234; 1979:283) and others once thought, it is now evident that Polynesians
cannot be derived, biologically speaking, directly from
Asia. They must have emerged out of an earlier ‘‘Melanesian’’ population matrix not only in ‘‘language’’ and
‘‘culture’’ but also in ‘‘biology.’’ Contrary to what supporters of Howells’s argument insist, saying this does
not have to mean that ‘‘Polynesians evolved within
Melanesia from a population resident there for at least
30,000 years’’—‘‘that Polynesians evolved entirely from
Melanesian stock’’ (e.g., Serjeantson and Hill 1989:287).
In reality, the writing of the history of Melanesia’s remarkable biological heterogeneity is, unfortunately, in
its infancy.
We might take this straightforward solution to the
question of Polynesian origins somewhat further. That
the ancestors of the Polynesians came from somewhere
in Irwin’s voyaging corridor rather than from Southeast
Asia seems obvious enough to make the real Polynesian
puzzle no longer about Pacific Islanders but about foreign scholarship in the Pacific. Why have biologists and
geneticists continued to embrace the fallacy of seeing
the Polynesian story as the main line of biological and
culture history of the Pacific? Why has Melanesia’s diversity seemed less problematic? Looking at the Pacific
through such an interpretive lens underestimates the
potential of new molecular techniques for probing anthropologically interesting patterns of human adaptation, population structure, and demographic history
(Terrell and Stewart 1996). Terrell and Welsch anticipate, for example, that nuclear DNA markers will evidence extensive gene flow among village populations on
the Sepik coast of New Guinea. However, if intermar-
riage in former years was as rare as is now often locally
asserted, there should be mtDNA divergence even without nuclear genetic isolation (Hoelzer et al. 1994; Melnick and Hoelzer 1992, 1993). While they expect local
patterns of human biogeographical diversity to be complex (for example, because of village movement, fission,
and coalescence [see Roscoe 1989a, 1994; Fix 1995]), it
will be instructive to discover how closely language and
mtDNA diversity track one another in spite of social,
economic, and cultural interaction and integration. A
strong correlation between language and restricted female mobility on the coast in the absence of reproductive isolation would further confirm that simplistic
views of the covariation of ‘‘race, language, and culture’’
contribute little to our understanding of history and human diversity.
language
The agenda for anthropological research in the Pacific
that Goodenough presented at the AAAS in 1956 was
inspired by methodological procedures commonly used
in comparative research in historical linguistics.
Goodenough’s sketch of what was then known about
Pacific prehistory was based principally on linguistic
evidence. He was not, however, the first or the last to
give linguistics a privileged role in Pacific research. The
story of Pacific prehistory has commonly been told as
a story about the movement of Austronesian-speaking
people from Southeast Asian to Polynesia (e.g., Bellwood 1979, Brace and Hinton 1981, Clark and Kelly
1993). The growing pace of archaeological research in
the Pacific, the discovery of humankind’s great antiquity in the region, and the recognition that language
similarities and differences can be a poor measure of biological and cultural history are scholarly advances that
challenge the privileged status of linguistics in Pacific
research. Can historical linguistics, nonetheless, still
contribute to our understanding of human diversity in
the Pacific?
The linguists Andrew Pawley and Malcolm Ross
(1993) have recently summarized what Austronesian
historical linguistics, in particular, has to say about Pacific culture history. Making lexical reconstructions
and charting an accurate picture of historical relationships among Pacific languages is hampered by constraints of both method and data. Nonetheless, Pawley
and Ross favor the view—also championed by others
(Bellwood 1988, 1991, 1993; Diamond 1996; Spriggs
1989)–that the far-flung modern distribution of the
Austronesian languages maps an ancient Neolithic ‘‘diaspora’’ of immigrant Austronesian-speakers (probably)
out of East or Southeast Asia (1993:425–27, 448–49).
Diamond, once again, has adopted the most extreme
reading of this argument. Seeing China’s role in East
Asia as disproportionately large, he attributes China’s
dominance to the plant and animal domestication that
began there 10,000 years ago. On the basis of these
achievements, ‘‘China became Chinese, and peoples
from Thailand to Easter Island became their cousins’’
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 173
F i g. 3. The Austronesian languages viewed as a set of temporally related languages (after Terrell 1986 b:
fig. 87).
(1996:85). Perhaps so, but the subgroupings of Austronesian languages (fig. 3) are not just linguistic but geographic (Terrell 1986b:248–49). Furthermore, lexical reconstructions do little to pin down precisely where the
Austronesian ‘‘homeland’’ or ‘‘primary dispersal center’’ was located in the southwestern Pacific even if it
is assumed that Austronesian languages were spread by
immigrants (Pawley and Ross 1993:440, 442–43).
The archaeologist William Meacham wrote a decade
ago that the likely place of origin of Austronesian would
seem to be the broad triangular area formed by Taiwan,
Sumatra, and Timor, where the reputedly oldest Malayo-Polynesian languages are found and where no other
languages are spoken today. He proposed that we call
this area Austronesia (Meacham 1988:94–95). We
would phrase Meacham’s argument somewhat more expansively. New understanding of the geography of Pacific prehistory suggests that languages spoken in Irwin’s voyaging corridor between island Southeast Asia
and the Solomons ought to share a discernible pattern
and a reticulated common history. They do; they are
called the Austronesian family of languages. Languages
spoken in parts of Near Oceania outside the voyaging
corridor should exhibit less commonality, less reticulation, less historical cohesiveness. They do; they are
called non-Austronesian languages.
As elementary as these observations may be, not everyone can accept this interpretation of Austronesian
origins. Peter Bellwood has argued repeatedly that Aus-
tronesian was carried out into the Pacific by early Neolithic rice-cultivating colonists following their expansion out of southern China around 6,000 years ago
(Bellwood 1988:109; 1991; 1993). He has contested Meacham’s dismissal of linguistic evidence for placing the
origin of Austronesian on or near Taiwan. Thinking
that the Austronesian languages originated over the
whole of island Southeast Asia is no more likely, Bellwood maintains, than saying that they got started in
southern China or even Vietnam (1988:112). He considers it more logical that ‘‘the expansion of these languages took place primarily through an expansion of
founder groups of speakers, rather than by a process
whereby totally unmoving populations all abandoned
their own languages and learned some attractive new
early Austronesian lingua franca, all the way from Taiwan to Timor [and beyond]’’ (1988:110).
Implying that Meacham thinks early Austronesian
was a lingua franca comparable perhaps to modern Malay (Bellwood 1988:109) prejudices the case in Bellwood’s favor. Evidently, too, he thinks that language
learning and linguistic transmission are likely to occur
only between generations, not across them. If so, he underestimates the ethnographically documented ‘‘fluidity’’ of language in the Pacific (Mead 1938:159–60; Pawley and Ross 1993:448–52). As Filer (1990:125) has
written, ‘‘People may adopt new languages and language-groups may adopt new people; languages may be
‘exchanged’ without their speakers, and speakers may
174 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
cross language boundaries without their languages.’’
There is, however, a need for linguistics research specifically designed to study processes of language diversification and contact (Ross n.d.). Geraghty’s study of Fijian dialectal geography (1983) has already shown the
worth of such basic research. Intensive fieldwork in historical sociolinguistics, however, needs to be coupled
with the development of theoretical models defining
the conditions under which language is likely to vary
with biology and culture. We are a long way from understanding how variation in the sociolinguistic environments in which languages are used—and languages are
learned by children and adults—has determined in specific instances whether culture history or human genetic history has been coincident with language history
(Terrell n.d. b).
Discussion
Looking back over the past 50 years, it is clear that the
commonsense idea that people living on islands have
lived isolated lives has played a useful role in Pacific research. In spite of what individuals such as Margaret
Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski accomplished before
World War II, scholars who went out to the Pacific after
the war more often than not went to places where no
anthropologist had gone. They had to be research pioneers, just as Mead and Malinowski had been. As astonishing as it may seem, for instance, the first modern
stratigraphic excavations in New Guinea were not done
until 1959 (Allen 1972). The idea that island societies
were isolates simplified the scope and complexity of
what had to be accomplished under these pioneering
conditions. But, as Lesser (1961:41) argued, the conception of early or primitive human life as a world of closed
social aggregates out of touch with others was grounded
in a number of doubtful assumptions: (1) that the nonWestern world was inhabited by a large number of separate, small-scale, local societies that could be thought
of as distinct analytical units or phenomena; (2) that
analysis of social process, culture change, and social
evolution within such societies could be conducted as
if these small social worlds were human isolates; (3)
that even when allowances were made for diffusion and
intercommunication between these societies, the impact of other societies could be treated as external, fortuitous, haphazard, or insignificant; and (4) that therefore, for purposes of analysis, the more encompassing
social environment could be stripped away to reveal the
inner workings, the system of relations, that constituted the essential process—the inner life—of individual, delimited societies.
As working premises, these assumptions were valuable. Making things simple so that you can see clearly
what is happening is what every good experiment attempts to do. Unfortunately, a price must be paid for
simplicity. For example, Pacific archaeology’s postwar
enthusiasm for the rigor and precision of the comparative method of linguistics (in spite of cautions by lin-
guists such as Bloomfield and Biggs) was based, in effect, on an elementary syllogism: islands are isolates;
the comparative method treats languages as if they were
isolated; therefore, the writing of the prehistory of island cultures can be as precise as historical linguistics
if we follow the dictates of the comparative method and
display our results as a family tree. But as Bloomfield
said, the family-tree model cultivates simplicity and
precision at the expense of historical realism.
Today Pacific scholarship is no longer in its pioneering phase. We now need to favor realism over simplicity. In plain speech, we need facts more than convenient
solutions to the riddles posed by the remarkable human
diversity of the Pacific region. It seems particularly
ironic that what was once a major focus of archaeological research—discovering when and in what order the
islands were colonized by human migrants—is now virtually a nonproblem. At least in the southwestern Pacific, people got to the islands so long ago that it is hard
to imagine how learning ‘‘who got where when’’ can really help us understand variation in culture, language,
and biology. Thus what used to be seen as easy to explain in this way—why people in the Pacific differ so
in appearance, customs, and language—now looks truly
enigmatic. If these island societies have not been closed
but ‘‘constitutionally open to peoples lying beyond
their territorial borders’’ (Biersack 1991:13), then how
did this diversity evolve in the absence of isolation?
And how has it managed to survive? All those many
languages spoken, for instance, on the Sepik coast of
New Guinea have been maintained (and in many cases
have locally evolved) in spite of complex patterns of
mobility and intercommunication. We think that current linguistic and anthropological theory is inadequate
to account for such a state of affairs. Just as we need
more facts, we need better hypotheses.
What should take the place of the concept of the
primitive isolate? We distrust programmatic statements and new agendas. We think, nonetheless, that
there is merit in what Alexander Lesser advocated a
generation ago. We should adopt as a working hypothesis the universality of contact and influence as a fundamental feature of human existence. We should think of
social life and human history as a time and space continuum of human association, a weblike field of social
relations, a social field (1961:47):
The field concept, I suggest, is particularly useful in
understanding social evolutionary change that has
taken place in human history. It unites . . . the
study of those patterned interpersonal relations usually considered external, or merely a matter of historical accident, and those that are an integral part
of a particular social aggregate. It breaks down the
notion that history involves mere happenstance
which interferes with analysis of social process in
systems of relations, of order and regularity in
events. History and synchronic analysis become
parts of one universe of discourse, of one order or
level of the human social process.
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 175
It is appropriate, however, to add here a note of caution.
Shifting how we think about the dimensions of social
life in favor of Lesser’s more empirical notion that patterned social relations are a universal constant of life
will not guarantee that research work will be productive and successful. Accepting the view, for instance,
that island peoples have actively maintained structured
ties or valences (e.g., marriage, adoption, feasting, exchange, friendship, etc.) with others near and far for social and survival reasons and have tried to avoid situations that would lead to their isolation does not rule out
the likelihood that people have been able to run their
lives and conduct their affairs more or less as if other
people did not exist. As Herbert Simon (1973:23) once
observed:
To a Platonic mind, everything in the world is connected with everything else—and perhaps it is. Everything is connected, but some things are more
connected than others. The world is a large matrix
of interactions in which most of the entries are very
close to zero, and in which, by ordering those entries according to their orders of magnitude, a distinct hierarchic structure can be discerned.
Hence giving up the notion that islands are isolated
worlds may achieve little if we are unsuccessful at
finding out how people, places, and events ‘‘on the outside’’ have influenced—sometimes decisively, sometimes not—what people ‘‘on the inside’’ thought, did,
and accomplished.
For archaeologists, the job ahead calls for determining
patterns of interaction and relatedness from hard evidence. Progress has been made in recent years in developing the expertise needed to do so (e.g., Allen 1996; Allen and Johnson 1994; Hunt 1988, 1989; Hunt and
Graves 1991; Kirch 1991b; Graves, Hunt, and Moore
1991; Terrell and Welsch 1991; Weisler 1993, 1994;
Welsch and Terrell n.d.; Wickler 1991). The difficulty,
however, is that a lack of material evidence for prehistoric contact and communication does not necessarily
mean that people have lived isolated lives. Any surviving archaeological evidence for contact may be the tip of
the iceberg of what was actually happening in the past
(Terrell n.d.c). As recent work in the Bismarck Archipelago (e.g., Allen and Gosden 1991, Specht et al. 1988)
has shown, tracking complex patterns of prehistoric interaction probably requires complementary regional
and intensive local studies.
In addition, saying that the time has come to favor
historical realism over simplicity in studying human diversity in the Pacific does not have to mean that the
simplifying assumptions of family-tree models or Durham’s ECT no longer have any useful role to play in Pacific scholarship. There are, for example, numerous
computer programs in the social and biological sciences
that generate dendrograms, phenograms, hierarchies,
cladograms, etc., almost effortlessly if variation can be
expressed numerically. Running them can be an easy
way to get a first approximation of how similar places,
peoples, and artifact assemblages may be to one another. While much information may be lost in the
transformation from matrix to dendrogram, any reasonably complete data matrix can be reduced to such a diagram or picture, and it is then fairly easy to see how
differing computational methods, differing clustering
algorithms, and differing criteria of optimality, parsimony, and so on, generate different trees (Ruvolo 1987,
Sankoff 1978, Wang 1978). Deciding what is a ‘‘good fit’’
between a given matrix and the multitude of possible
trees that can be generated from it may be humbling for
anyone who believes that data lead only to a single right
answer; computing different trees from the same data
set can also be an effective way to simulate alternative
situations based on different modeling assumptions—
which makes such an exercise similar to ‘‘what if ’’ financial analysis using computer spreadsheets.
One of the remarkable things about human beings is
the complexity of human thought. Today it may be
more obvious than it used to be that time-honored ways
of thinking about people and the past did not look
closely enough at how people construct and maintain
social fields reaching beyond the limits of their own
face-to-face community, their own ‘‘society.’’ Yet even
this statement must be qualified. As the work of Alkire
(1965), Harding (1967), and Sillitoe (1978) documents,
this is not something that no one has said before. We
do not need to throw away what has already been
learned. It is time for more of us to look farther afield.
We now need to favor historical realism over research
convenience and deductive simplicity. We need to
avoid sorting people into arbitrary types. We need to be
wary about thinking that history and diversity in the
Pacific can be reduced to a few grand moments of genesis and immigration.
Comments
peter bellwood
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology,
Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T.
0200, Australia. 5 viii 96
This paper, rather lengthy and rich in innuendo, mainly
states the obvious. Some Pacific peoples communicated
with one another in prehistory. Would anyone today
find this surprising, even under the threatening shadow
of the ‘‘1950s agenda’’? No, because the prolonged attack on the ‘‘myth of the primitive isolate’’ forms a
smokescreen to blur the real agenda. This is to argue
that cultures cannot be classified phylogenetically and
that the concept of a radiative dispersal of Austronesian-speaking peoples from Island Southeast Asia into
the Pacific about 3,500 years ago is incorrect. Yet instead of attacking the latter concept by means of a detailed analysis of all the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data from Oceania and Southeast Asia which
176 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
are said by some to support it (e.g., Bellwood, Fox, and
Tryon 1995), Terrell et al. simply retreat into a debate
about isolation and interaction.
For instance, Pacific societies are said to relate to one
another more via interaction than via ancestry. This
may be true now for many regions, but does it mean
that there can never have been any phylogenetically radiative dispersal in the Pacific, even in Polynesia? Presumably not for these authors, who labour to discredit
the idea that Pacific societies can be seen as isolated
laboratories for studying phylogenetically determined
differentiation. Historical circumstances differ in time
and space; prejudging cultural trajectories in favour of
an interaction model of determination and rejecting
descent, as these authors do, seems unwise (Bellwood
n.d. a).
In addition, Terrell et al. ignore a major factor in interaction. Polynesian interisland communication was
on a like-to-like basis, amongst people who in their
early prehistory were still probably speaking a single
language or chain of intercomprehensible dialects. This
is quite unlike the situation in western Melanesia,
where people of very different linguistic backgrounds
must have come face to face, even in terms of these authors’ no-migration scenario. Important theoretical
questions such as how alike or different the purported
interactors were and how relative degrees of cultural
difference could have affected the outcomes of interaction in genetic, linguistic, and cultural terms are hardly
raised at all.
The section on genetics reiterates that Polynesians
need not be derived from Southeast Asia, and genetic
data suggesting otherwise (e.g., Redd et al. 1995; Melton
et al. 1995) are either ignored or dismissed. In their attempt to discard Austronesian migration as a major factor in Pacific prehistory Terrell et al. necessarily fall
back on the view (admittedly qualified in places) that
all the peoples of the Pacific are derived from varied and
ancient western Melanesian populations. Of course,
people in Melanesia interacted 20,000 years ago—they
had watercraft of some kind and moved marsupials and
carried small amounts of obsidian from one island to
another. But the authors hardly demonstrate that this
has anything significant to do with the colonization of
Polynesia 10 or 20 millennia later.
The final section on linguistics is no more convincing. To refute a radiative explanation for Austronesian
languages Terrell et al. say that the Austronesian subgroups are not just linguistic but also geographic, apparently without realising that this, being obviously true,
will also apply in terms of a coherent migration theory.
People in prehistory both migrated and interacted
through continuous geographic space. The authors say
that lexical reconstructions do not pin down an Austronesian homeland without acknowledging that the
comparative reconstruction of Austronesian language
homeland and history also involves grammatical and
phonological considerations (Tryon 1995). Likewise,
family trees with discrete branches are not the only way
to represent the history of a language family—networks
can also differentiate genetically, as they surely have in
Polynesia. They say that one cannot track the migrations of Polynesians using linguistic patterns of subgroup innovation because well-bounded nests of
uniquely shared innovations do not exist. The obvious
alternative explanation—that Polynesian migrations
cannot easily be traced because of rapid and far-flung
dispersal from a linguistically unified western Polynesian homeland, a situation discouraging clear subgroup
ranking—is not considered.
Meacham’s idea of mass-scale linguistic convergence
across much of Island Southeast Asia is also foregrounded without criticism. One might ask why, if
Meacham is right, the traditional languages of all the
interacting societies of ethnographic western Melanesia, Austronesian and Non-Austronesian alike, did
not converge into one common lingua franca prior to
European contact, a kind of equivalent of Proto-Austronesian in Meacham’s terms? Melanesia is almost a
case of ‘‘more interaction, more linguistic diversity,’’ in
direct opposition to the Meacham hypothesis.
Indeed, the aspect of this paper which disturbs me the
most is that authors seem to care nothing about the
Austronesian world west of New Guinea—they hardly
acknowledge its existence and seem quite unaware that
all but about 2 million of the 270 million Austronesianspeaking peoples live west of Irian Jaya. Island Southeast Asia has detailed archaeological and linguistic records (Blust 1995, Bellwood n.d. b) and an immense ethnographic record, involving hundreds of communities
whose cultures and traditions resemble those of the Pacific Austronesians in so many ways that to ascribe the
resemblances to interaction alone leaves far more questions unanswered than does the Austronesian migration scenario which is so strongly attacked. I would be
interested to hear just how these authors think the Austronesian family of languages has spread more than
halfway around the world. Why do Austronesian and
Non-Austronesian language families/phyla exist at all?
Are linguistic classifications pure imagination? Or is radiative population dispersal through a previously inhabited landscape perhaps not such a 1950s idea after all?
ben finney
Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii,
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, U.S.A. 22 vi 96
This is a most important work. The authors have done
a magnificent job in analyzing a major shift in thinking
about Pacific island prehistory from treating island cultures as isolates to realizing just how peripatetic the islanders actually were. After recalling the ‘‘1950s research agenda’’ for studying island societies as isolated
‘‘natural laboratories’’ of cultural differentiation, they
concentrate on how archaeologists who had embraced
this agenda in whole or in part are now abandoning it
as evidence mounts for intentional settlement and for
extensive postsettlement, two-way voyaging. This evidence comes from their own excavations, as well as
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 177
other sources such as experimental voyaging. As someone who has long sought to develop a realistic perspective on the role of voyaging in the settlement of the
Pacific and the subsequent development of island societies by reconstructing the sailing canoes, relearning
how to sail and navigate them by traditional means, and
then testing the resultant craft and skills on the long
sea routes of Polynesia celebrated in oral traditions, I
welcome this paper and also the credit it gives to our
experimental voyaging efforts.
I would like to offer a few comments from my own
experience in this virtual paradigm shift. To be sure, as
Terrell et al. point out, social anthropologists were the
primary advocates of the island-isolation/natural-laboratory approach, and the 1950s works by social anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Irving Goldman were
the most prominent early attempts to employ it. However, I would say that from the 1960s onwards archaeologists have been its most vigorous advocates and practitioners. In the mid-1960s my students and I built the
first of the modern reconstructions of sailing canoes
dedicated to conducting realistic sea trials that might
provide data relevant to such issues as Sharp’s so-called
accidental-voyaging hypothesis and the assumption of
postsettlement isolation of individual societies. Although I expected some skepticism, I was surprised by
the vigorous opposition to our efforts expressed by some
archaeologists who had a methodological stake in accidental, random settlement followed by isolation. One
of them, for example, condescendingly informed me
that this was the era of the ‘‘New Archaeology’’ and research such as mine was passé, as the scientific study
of processes of local adaptation and change had replaced
outdated cultural historical studies of migration and
diffusion. He then went on to explain that he was considering switching his research focus to Polynesia because the extreme isolation of the accidentally settled
islands meant that local processes could be delineated
without worrying about outside influences during and
after colonization.
As Terrell et al. point out, despite the appeal of supposed island isolation, findings from excavations from
the Lapita voyaging corridor to the far reaches of Polynesia, along with practical demonstrations of how well
indigenous canoes, navigation systems, and sailing
strategies and skills are adapted to long-range voyaging,
have led most archaeologists to realize that intentional
and at times frequent interisland and interarchipelago
communication played a major role in the development
of island societies. In fact, liberating Pacific archaeology
from isolationism has fostered a virtual growth industry
in research and publication on Pacific colonization and
mobility—as witness, in addition to this paper, Geoffrey Irwin’s computer simulation and theoretical works
and the increasingly popular tracing of adzes and other
artifacts to their often distant geological sources.
Thanks to this oceanic perspective we can look forward
to more sophisticated models of how island societies
developed as part of larger wholes, as well as of how the
waxing and waning of interisland and interarchipelago
communication has been related to cultural differentiation.
The recent explosion of canoe voyaging around Polynesia may be relevant here. In 1995 eight reconstructed
voyaging canoes from Hawai’i, Aotearoa, the Cook Islands, and Tahiti rendezvoused in French Polynesia,
and six of them sailed together from the Marquesas to
Hawai’i to commemorate the discovery and settlement
of that archipelago. But the issue of whether the original
colonizers of Hawai’i came from the Marquesas, Tahiti,
the Cook Islands, or elsewhere in Polynesia did not
strike these modern Polynesian sailors as particularly
important. In meeting one another and sailing together
it became obvious to them that their commonalities
outweighed their differences and that their individual
histories were so intertwined that unraveling who did
what first was beside the point. Indeed, I got the impression that they would probably have been willing to accept that early voyagers from several of the groups, if
not all of them, might have taken part in various settlement voyages to Hawai’i. Furthermore, as their voyage
through French Polynesia to Hawai’i developed, the
way the groups mixed and matched everything from
sailing rigs to the rituals at the many ceremonies conducted along the way may be telling. However jarring
such blurring of the cultural boundaries enshrined in
our studies might seem, it may be indicative of past processes when voyaging for adze blades, red feathers, and
other valued items or for romance, adventure, religious
pilgrimage, and the like, joined together people and
their ideas over wide stretches of the Pacific.
w ar d h. g oo d e n o u g h
Department of Anthropology, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104-6398, U.S.A.
10 vii 96
As Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden observe, I have argued
that the islands of what we now refer to as Remote Oceania (Green 1991) provide the best available region
within which to study cultural evolution as a process
of ramifying internal change (Goodenough 1957). Kirch
and Green (1987) have argued likewise. Having been initially settled by Austronesian-speaking people with a
common protolanguage and protoculture and having remained free of subsequent settlement by people of different linguistic and cultural traditions for at least
2,000–3,000 years prior to European intrusion, the various island groups of Remote Oceania soon became relatively isolated from one another. Once populations began to build up, subsequent arrivals, all people with
related languages and cultures, were usually too few in
number to effect a replacement of the already established language and culture with their own. They were
linguistically and culturally absorbed or introduced
some loanwords and particular customary practices.
Even where new settlers had a profound influence on
the older language and culture, as Samoan settlers did
in Micronesian Kiribati and Tongan settlers in Rotuma,
178 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
it is possible to sort out much of the borrowed vocabulary and cultural institutions from the older ones. Careful comparative linguistic and cultural study makes detection of such loans possible.
A notable example is the presence of ceremonial kava
drinking in Pohnpei in Micronesia. As I have been able
to show, the Pohnpeian word for kava, sakau/sakaw/,
is a loan from Polynesian ta kava, in which the Polynesian prefixed ‘‘article’’ ta, not found in Pohnpeian, has
been interpreted to be a part of the name. In addition
to kava, the only other evidence so far known to me of
Polynesian immigrants into Pohnpei is Sahngoro (loanword from Polynesian Tangaroa), an alternative name
of the thunder god Nahnsapwe and title of the Nahnmwarki, the highest-ranking chiefship (Goodenough
1986, Rehg and Sohl 1979).
In historical linguistics, systematic comparison of related languages has produced a great deal of information
about how languages evolve through internal change as
well as what happens to them when their speakers are
in close contact with speakers of other languages. We
have not had the kind of controlled situation needed
even to begin to acquire comparable information about
how cultural traditions evolve through internal change.
Remote Oceania, I suggested in 1957, offered a unique
opportunity for us to examine the effects of such processes, because there we were dealing with what we
have excellent reason to assume were phylogenetically
related cultural traditions as well as phylogenetically
related languages.
At the time of that writing, I was persuaded by Andrew Sharp’s thesis (1956) regarding the limited ability
of the people of Remote Oceania to make deliberate
voyages of distances greater than a few hundred miles.
The experimental voyages of the Hukule’a (Finney
1994) have convinced me that long-distance voyaging
was a capability of the Lapita settlers of Remote Oceania. Such capability did not mean, however, that, once
the island clusters were settled, cultural and linguistic
mixing between island groups continued to a significant
extent on down to the beginning of the historic period.
Within island groups, the kind of interchange that Terrell et al. talk about did, of course, continue, each such
group constituting what anthropologists used to call a
culture area (these authors might well have used that
term). But each such area was relatively isolated from
the others. There was, at most, very little interchange
between the Hawaiian and Society Islands, between the
Marquesas and the Society Islands, or between the
Cook and Society Islands. Between the other island
groups there was virtually none. In the Central Pacific,
the Fiji, Tongan, and Samoan archipelagos maintained
voyaging contact from their first settlement onwards,
but each of them developed linguistically and culturally
in its own way—not without influence one on the other
but each maintaining its own distinctive heritage. I see
no reason to retract what I argued in 1957.
As distinct from Remote Oceania, Near Oceania presents a very different picture. Trading has been going on
from the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia to the Bis-
marcks and back for a very long time and to the Solomon Islands as well for the past 7,000 years. The mix
here has involved interactions among linguistically and
culturally more heterogeneous peoples than in Remote
Oceania. Speakers of non-Austronesian languages were
in the area for millennia prior to the arrival of Austronesian-speakers. The people who brought the Lapita culture and Proto-Eastern-Oceanic dialects to Remote Oceania were already a product of at least several centuries
of interaction between Austronesian- and non-Austronesian-speakers in Near Oceania. The continuing
evolution of local languages and cultures in the latter
area has been more like that of those on continental
landmasses, though the area is also characterized by a
high degree of linguistic and cultural parochialism.
As the foregoing indicates, the common linguistic
and cultural heritage of people in Remote Oceania had
its immediate roots in Near Oceania and was the product of interaction there between Austronesian and nonAustronesian peoples. That does not vitiate the utility
of Remote Oceania for the study of phylogenetically related cultural traditions, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Goodenough 1983). The phylogenetically related
Polynesian cultures had their common roots in the Fiji
Archipelago and cannot be traced as distinctively Polynesian west of the Central Pacific (Kirch and Green
1987). If we are to pay attention to history, we need to
get our history straight.
In closing, I must point out that Terrell et al. seem to
assume that the branching or cladistic model of linguistic and cultural evolution requires that branches, once
begun, remain totally isolated from one another to preserve their respective identities as such. Contact between Japan and the United States has resulted in considerable borrowing in language and culture by Japan
and some reverse borrowing by the United States, but
their languages and cultures retain their respectively
distinct phylogenetic identities. The extensive borrowing among Indo-European languages does not render
their cladistic ordering impossible. Terrell et al. also argue against the utility of phylogenetically oriented
study for Oceania in general, including Remote Oceania, by citing the long and complicated history of ethnic
interactions in Near Oceania. Nowhere in their discussion do they clearly distinguish between the two areas.
Their arguments correctly call attention to the much
more complicated culture history of Near Oceania, but
they lose force when applied to Remote Oceania.
g e o r ge w. g r a c e
Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaii,
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, U.S.A. 21 vi 96
I entirely agree with Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden that
scholars interested in the culture history of the Pacific
area have, at least in their working assumptions, generally exaggerated the isolation of ethnic traditions, and I
agree that it is important to look for remedies. I agree
also that this problem has not been peculiar to the Pa-
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 179
cific region. What probably strikes me most about their
paper is how much their criticisms parallel my own of
assumptions made in linguistics. We linguists have
treated languages as isolates. Moreover, in a way quite
parallel to their (Lesser’s) list of ‘‘doubtful assumptions’’ we have assumed that (1) human language exists
in the form of individual languages, which are naturally
separate units; (2) each language is a system of grammatical rules and lexical items which can be used to
form meaningful expressions; (3) it is by applying these
rules and lexical items that someone who has learned a
language is able to produce meaningful expressions and
understand the expressions uttered by other speakers;
and (4) for each language there is a community consisting of all and only the speakers of that language (by
virtue of the fact that the other members of the community are the people that any given member can communicate with). The words of Schneider (1984:3) cited by
Terrell et al. can also apply so well to these assumptions
about language that I would like to repeat them here:
‘‘This wisdom is entrenched in our thinking and especially in our theory, which derives closely from our own
cultural notions. These are very compelling ideas, for
the doctrines seem self-evident, as well they should if
they are essentially our own cultural conceptions.’’
There are some further assumptions that probably do
not derive so obviously from our cultural traditions. For
example, we have assumed that diachronic processes in
language can be studied by examining the changes
within the individual grammatical-lexical systems. Furthermore, it is often claimed that the explanation for a
change must be sought in the state of the system prior
to the change, although there are now increasing attempts to take into account the actual usages within
the community. This set of assumptions overlooks a
number of things.
First of all, when actual usages within particular communities are examined, it becomes evident that the
communities (and the linguistic usages of the speakers)
are often not at all uniform. That is to say, what gets
counted as belonging to the same language may not add
up to a very uniform system.
Second, not all of the people who speak what we
judge to be the same language necessarily belong to the
same community if ‘‘community’’ is defined either as
an interacting group or as a group with which the speakers themselves identify.
Third, not all people are monolingual. In Melanesia
there are many villages in which everyone speaks the
same two languages. In fact, a number of cases have
been reported of a community’s more or less abruptly
switching its emblematic language (i.e., the language
that the people associate with their ethnic identity).
There are also villages in which most or all individuals
are multilingual but different individuals know different languages, so that there are ties reaching out in a
number of different directions. In sum, it would be very
inaccurate to assume that the ‘‘community’’ of speakers
of a particular language even approximately defines the
network of friends and acquaintances with whom any
given speaker communicates. It would be equally inaccurate to assume that all of this communication takes
place by means of a single uniform language.
A language is likely to show the effects of frequent
use by its speakers of other languages or different dialects, but these effects are deliberately overlooked in genetic classification. We have hardly begun to learn how
to look for them, but they surely have the potential to
tell us a lot more about the culture history of the region.
Ross (1996) gives some indication of the possibilities.
Since simplifying assumptions seem to be necessary
if we are to formulate questions sufficiently focused for
scientific investigation, we cannot expect any new research program to be able to take everything into account at once. The new paradigm will also wind up
making simplifying assumptions, but we can quite reasonably hope that its blind spots will be different from
the present ones and that the result will be a much
better-rounded picture of the Pacific region’s past.
v ol k e r h ar m s
Institut für Ethnologie, Universität Tübingen,
Schloss, D-72070 Tübingen, Germany. 19 vi 96
Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden rightly criticize the scientific
use of the notion of islands as laboratories propagated
in the late fifties by such eminent scholars as Mead and
Goodenough but only because the proposed programme
of research went astray, as became apparent from the
findings of subsequent research, mainly in archaeology
and physical anthropology. They overlook the ethical
implications of a research design which assumes that
the history and social life of human populations can be
investigated with the moral views of a researcher constructing theories about the social life of ants.
The first part of the article immediately calls to mind
a sentence written by the founding father of ethnology
(sociocultural anthropology) in Germany, Adolf Bastian
(1826–1905). In 1881 he wrote (p. 176): ‘‘We may, therefore, without restraint analyse them [i.e., ‘‘primitive
people,’’ Naturvölker], cut them to pieces, pull them
apart, we can without objection vivisect them in their
psychic creations.’’1 Nearly a century had to pass before
Bastian was criticized for this opinion in an unpublished doctoral thesis by Winkelmann (1966). To take
an island population as the equivalent of a laboratory is
strongly reminiscent of Bastian, who—like the majority
of his contemporaries—was an ardent supporter of colonialism (see Winkelmann 1963). Nearly 35 years after
the first island nation of the Pacific, Western Samoa, became an independent state, it is time to consider the
above-mentioned assumption from an ethical viewpoint.
It may be American philosophical pragmatism that
has kept ethical considerations from being integrated
1. ‘‘Wir mögen sie [die ‘Naturvölker’] also unbehindert analysieren,
zerreissen, zerzausen, wir können sie, ohne weiteren Einspruch, in
ihren psychischen Schöpfungen viviseciren.’’
180 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
into the methodological reflections of U.S. cultural anthropologists and led them to the view that ethical
problems arise only in the direct confrontation with research subjects in the context of applied anthropology
or ethnographic fieldwork (see, e.g., Rinkiewich and
Spradley 1976, Fluehr-Lobban 1991). For a contrasting
point of view I would draw attention to Amborn (1993)
and Harms (1993).
Looking at the issue from another angle, I would
point to an important detail which is related directly to
the colonialistic bias of anthropology in the fifties. As
Talal Asad (1991:315) has put it, ‘‘the fact of European
power, as discourse and practice, was always part of the
reality anthropologists sought to understand, and of the
way [my emphasis] they sought to understand it.’’
Without this colonialistic bias the generation of Mead,
Goodenough, and Goldman could never have seen, as
Goodenough (1957:148–150) and Goldman (1957:375 n.
4) did, the theories of Sharp (1956) about the island
colonisation of Polynesia as a corroboration of their
views of the Polynesian cultures. Instead they would
have been obliged to see, as other anthropologists had
done already, that Sharp’s views were demeaning.
Therefore, I think that not only have the findings of the
research on the Pacific Islands in recent decades made
it urgent to advance the views of Terrell and his colleagues but the processes of decolonisation should also
be taken into account in explicitly decolonising anthropology, even if after the fact.
g a r y m. h e a t hc o t e, v i n c e n t p. d i e g o,
f ra n k a. c a m a c h o, a n d t h o m a s f. t a i s i p i c
Anthropology Laboratory (Heathcote and Taisipic)
and Marine Laboratory (Diego and Camacho),
University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam 96923, U.S.A.
20 viii 96
Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden have written an important
but flawed essay on human diversity in the Pacific in
which they justly criticize those who focus on Polynesia ‘‘as the main line of biological and culture history
in the Pacific’’ to the exclusion of Melanesia. However,
they exclude Micronesia from their main discussions,
thus weakening their analysis by their own criticism. It
should be emphasized that it is easier to accept the theory they espouse if one ignores the evidence presented
by comparative studies that incorporate Micronesian
populations. While the peopling of Micronesia is not
well understood, the leading archaeological model is a
two-pronged one (see Bellwood 1979:281–96; Craib
1983; cf. Hunter-Anderson 1991), with the western high
islands (Palau, Yap, and the Marianas) being ‘‘seeded’’
by founding populations directly out of island Southeast
Asia while the more remote island groups (the more
eastern Carolines and the Marshalls) were colonized by
later movements of more southerly ‘‘Lapita peoples’’ issuing from eastern Melanesia (Butler 1994:15).
Certainly Terrell and colleagues are not alone among
contemporary Oceanists who purport to present big-
picture overviews or critiques of Pacific Islander origins
and relations yet give short shrift to Micronesia, and, as
is noted by Howells (1973:248), there is a long history
of such neglect. Until perhaps the late 1980s, such oversight could be excused on the basis of the relatively thin
and ‘‘grey’’ (unpublished) nature of much of the literature on Micronesian archaeology and human biology
(see Hunter-Anderson and Graves 1990, Pietrusewsky
1990c). The present state of Micronesian archaeology
and human biology, however, represents a marked improvement over that which existed a decade ago (see,
e.g., Intoh 1992, Rainbird 1994, Pietrusewsky 1994,
Hunter-Anderson and Butler 1995, Hanson 1995,
Heathcote 1995, Lum 1995, Melton et al. 1995). Still,
human biological-diversity investigations of Micronesians continue to lag in a number of areas earlier identified by Pietrusewsky (1990c) and Underwood (1990),
and we know that similar deficiencies plague our archaeological colleagues. Notwithstanding the continuing gaps in the Micronesian cultural and biological diversity records and our collective cognitive and
conceptual limitations on how to interpret them, if pursuit of ‘‘historical realism’’ on the issue of Pacific Islander human diversity is the main agenda, then, along
the same lines of their critique on the Polynesianist
bias, Terrell and colleagues should have included Micronesian societies in their essay.
Under the heading ‘‘Human Biology,’’ Terrell, Hunt,
and Gosden challenge the significant contributions of
physical anthropologists and human geneticists by casting doubt on their colleagues’ interpretive frameworks
and mindsets. A weakness of this section, however, is
their failure to consider certain key papers, viz., studies
on mtDNA (Hertzberg et al. 1989, Ballinger et al. 1992,
Cann 1993, Lum 1995, Melton et al. 1995, Redd et al.
1995, Sykes et al. 1995), nuclear-genes coding for globins (Trent et al. 1986, 1988; O’Shaughnessy et al.
1990), and products of other autosomal genes (Chen et
al. 1992), as well as morphological studies based on
craniometrics (Howells 1989, 1990; Pietrusewsky
1990a, b; Hanihara 1996) and dental nonmetric traits
(Turner 1990). All of these studies show that Micronesian and Polynesian populations are cladistically more
aligned, or have mutual biodistances that cluster more
closely with one another and with Southeast Asian populations than with populations of ancient Melanesian
ancestry.
Exceptions to this generalization of which we are
aware include investigations of odontometric and craniofacial metric relationships by Brace and colleagues
(1990; Brace, Tracer, and Hunt 1991). These studies
place the origin of Micronesians and Polynesians among
the aboriginal populations of Japan and the Ryukyu Islands rather than in Southeast Asia but are ‘‘consistent’’
with the above in rejecting a Melanesian origin for Polynesians and Micronesians. Similarly and interestingly,
studies of HLA Class II distributions (Gao, Zimmet, and
Serjeantson 1992, Serjeantson and Gao 1995) indicate
an East Asian origin for Polynesians (with Melanesian
gene flow indicated) but suggest a homeland farther
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 181
north than insular Southeast Asia. Pietrusewsky’s
(1994) biodistance analysis of the craniometric relationships of 53 Pacific and Asian groups produced results
largely concordant with the concept that Southeast
Asia, Polynesia, and Micronesia are a metapopulation
grouping with one notable exception: A pooled Micronesian series from the Carolines (individuals from Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk) clustered within his AustraloMelanesian grouping. Fact or artifact? Pietrusewsky did
not discuss this ‘‘anomaly,’’ if indeed it is one. Hagelberg and Clegg (1993), in a pioneering paper, have presented ancient bone mtDNA data which, they claim, do
not support an island Southeast Asian origin of modern
Polynesians. Although space limitations do not allow
us to dilate on their conclusion here (but see Diego et
al. n.d.), we think their interpretation is problematic at
a number of levels. All told, among the less (cf. Hagelberg and Clegg 1993) problematic ‘‘exceptional’’ studies
discussed above, not one reports a consistent pattern of
differentially closer Melanesian (vs. Asian or Southeast
Asian) affinities with Micronesians and Polynesians.
It needs emphasis that while some of the above-cited
genetic studies are explicitly supportive of an ‘‘express
train (out of Southeast Asia) to Polynesia’’ model (Diamond 1988), most provide results consistent with the
‘‘differentiator’’ model (Clegg 1994)—the idea that
Polynesian populations are ultimately derived from ancestors who were part of a cultural and biological continuum which linked island Southeast Asians with
Melanesians over thousands of years (see Gibbons
1994). However, lest readers wonder why Terrell and
colleagues do not robustly marshal such evidence in defense of their model, read on: Towards the end of their
section on human biology they criticize students of Pacific Islander diversity who invoke waves of migration
and isolation for adhering to a simplistic explanation.
This point has great merit, but then, with Kelly, they
offer their own simplistic theory, that the Polynesians
‘‘must have emerged out of an earlier ‘Melanesian’ population matrix not only in ‘language’ and ‘culture’ but
also ‘biology’ ’’—and offer this as ‘‘the most parsimonious interpretation.’’ They base this point on findings of
‘‘Melanesian’’ genetic markers in ‘‘Polynesian’’ populations. As we have noted, most recent genetic studies
have indeed found detectable Melanesian genetic influences in the gene pools of contemporary Micronesians and Polynesians. However, we reiterate that these
studies indicate that Micronesian, Polynesian, and
Southeast Asian populations are much closer to one another than to Melanesian populations.
The reverse of this position, that populations of Micronesia and Polynesia have a common ancestry predominantly in Melanesia and—over time—have accumulated a relatively greater genetic contribution from
Southeast Asian populations than have Melanesian
populations, has been deemed untenable by Serjeantson
and Hill (1989). We lean strongly in the latter direction.
Further, we protest that there is nothing typological
about the dominant-Southeast-Asian-ancestry argument. Indeed, this argument is critically dependent
upon the knowledge that there is much genetic variability within and among populations and it is this very
variability that makes it possible to address questions
bearing on origin and relationships (Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza 1976, Harrison et al. 1988). We feel that an
inspection of the literature, if ‘‘balanced,’’ dispels the
notion that typological thinking has wreaked havoc on
Pacific research.
To be sure, saying that the biological origin of populations from Micronesia and Polynesia lies somewhere in
Southeast Asia does not constitute evidence that the
cultural origins of these populations also lie in Southeast Asia. Archaeological and linguistic studies best inform this issue. Terrell and colleagues argue that linguistic studies may be unreliable for pinpointing an
origin. This, as they note, is a matter of great debate.
Tryon (1995), for one, has argued to the contrary—that
linguistic studies can demonstrate an origin for ProtoAustronesian and that this origin is in Southeast Asia.
But Terrell and colleagues correctly note that constructed linguistic phylogenies (no less than cultural or
biological ones) are open to ambiguous interpretation.
Certainly, culture (including language) is transmitted
(unlike genes) not only vertically but also horizontally
and obliquely. This makes for rather complicated dynamics in the evolution of language and culture as compared with biological evolution (Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldman 1981).
Though Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden make a good case
that the cultural origins of Polynesians are more complex than the orthodox scenario, they run counter to
this logic in arguing that because the cultural origins
of Polynesians seem to lie in Melanesia, so does their
biological origin. Again, demonstration of a biological
origin does not constitute evidence for a cultural origin
and vice versa. They do not explicitly make this argument, but since we consider the human biological
evidence wholly compelling that Polynesian and Micronesian populations were not derived from a predominantly ancestral Melanesian population matrix, their
argument reduces to a dependence on cultural affinities
to demonstrate biological affinities. This approach
should always be viewed with skepticism.
p a t r i c k v. k i r c h
Department of Anthropology, University of
California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A.
([email protected]). 9 vii 96
This is a clever piece of work, but it is not the pathbreaking contribution its authors intend. I say ‘‘clever’’
because Terrell et al. skillfully use an old debater’s trick
of constructing an extreme caricature of Pacific cultural
history, which to no one’s surprise is easily critiqued.
It would take more pages than allowed in CA’s format
to deconstruct the straw man that Terrell et al. have
created; I confine myself here to a few key points (but
see Kirch 1996 for a more detailed critique of some of
182 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
Terrell’s and Gosden’s views on Lapita and other aspects of Pacific prehistory).
1. The ‘‘myth of the primitive isolate’’ is a myth of
the authors’ creation. Yes, isolation has played an important role in anthropological and archaeological
thinking about the Pacific islands, but in reality it has
not been so overwhelmingly dominant as Terrell et al.
imply. The issue of interisland voyaging and contact
(whether through regular exchange relations or less systematic contacts) has been an important and continuing
theme of Pacific archaeology for more than four decades. Nonetheless, isolation will, in my opinion, remain an important concept in island anthropology, despite what Terrell et al. think. To quote the great Pacific
botanist Raymond Fosberg, ‘‘isolation . . . [is] basic to
insularity’’ (1963:5).
2. Isolation is a relative concept. The isolation of
Hawai’i, some 3,862 km from the nearest occupied archipelago, is not the same as the isolation of Samoa,
which lies within a ready one-to-three-day voyaging distance from several other islands and archipelagoes. And
in the case of Near Oceania (in the sense of Green 1991),
isolation was relatively insignificant given the voyaging
capabilities of even late Pleistocene peoples (Irwin
1992). But in Remote Oceania isolation was a key factor
(though hardly the only factor) in shaping island societies, as archaeological evidence has clearly revealed.
The Hawaiian archipelago, for example, appears to have
become completely cut off from the rest of Eastern
Polynesia after about a.d. 1200, despite an earlier period
of multiple return voyages. Even in the core region of
Eastern Polynesia, islands such as Ma’uke and Mangaia
ceased to have significant external contacts in their late
prehistoric phases (Walter 1990, Kirch et al. 1995). In
short, isolation matters, and the notion that there is no
conspicuous difference in the degree of isolation between Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia is simply
nonsense.
3. Terrell et al.’s disregard for and even distrust of the
comparative methods of historical linguists is disturbing, exemplifying precisely the kind of academic
narrow-mindedness referred to by Andrew Pawley and
Malcolm Ross: ‘‘Some prehistorians evidently find the
methods of historical linguistics so arcane . . . that they
prefer to ignore or discount the reconstructions as irrelevant to prehistory. This attitude is no more excusable
than that of a linguist who would ignore C14 dates for
artifact assemblages because he does not understand
how such dates are arrived at or who would discount
the relative dating of assemblages in any archaeological
sites on the suspicion that worms, humans or earthquakes have disturbed the layers’’ (1995:48–49). Citing
outdated lexicostatistical analyses by Emory and Dyen,
Terrell et al. try to convince us that the historical linguistic subgrouping of Eastern Polynesian languages
does not mesh with archaeological evidence. Again, a
straw man has been erected, for in reality the linguists’
model of a robust Eastern Polynesian subgroup accords
very well indeed with the current archaeological picture
of colonization of this part of Remote Oceania. But perhaps we should not be surprised at such bizarre machi-
nations, for Terrell’s (1981) notion that Austronesian
and Non-Austronesian languages had a common origin
in Melanesia is a view that not a single reputable linguist would take seriously.
4. It is more disturbing when the authors’ attempt to
shore up the shaky framework they have erected for
their straw man leads them into half-truths. I refer here
to their discussion of the Sepik region project of Terrell
and Robert Welsch (Welsch et al. 1992). Terrell et al. tell
us that this project has shown that linguistic relationships are not important in accounting for variability in
material culture between different villages on the Sepik
coast. What they fail to inform CA’s readers—in their
ardor to eliminate any role for historical linguistics in
Pacific anthropology—is that their own databases have
been thoroughly reexamined in a series of papers by
Carmella Moore and Kim Romney (Moore and Romney
1994, 1995; Roberts, Moore, and Romney 1995), who
have come to precisely the opposite conclusion. Moore
and Romney find that Terrell and Welsch’s data sets,
when analyzed by more appropriate statistical measures,
actually support the notion that linguistic relationships
are at least as good, if not better, at predicting the observed
material culture variability. I can understand that Terrell
et al. may not be pleased with the results that Moore and
Romney have obtained, since these contradict the former’s theoretical predilections, but I find it inexcusable
that Moore and Romney’s critical citations are not even
referenced. This is not scholarship.
5. The real agenda underlying Terrell et al.’s paper appears to be the discrediting of what has come to be
called the ‘‘phylogenetic model’’ or approach to cultural
history. Through a contorted series of arguments, the
authors try to convince us that isolation was not an important aspect of Pacific Islands societies and that as a
consequence the phylogenetic model is inherently
flawed. Aside from their misunderstanding of the relativeness of isolation (see above), they fail to appreciate
that the phylogenetic model is perfectly capable of dealing with intersocietal contact, as Kirch and Green
(1987) pointed out. But there is more at stake here for
anthropology, for the phylogenetic approach embodies
the intellectual power of the comparative method as applied not just in historical linguistics but in comparative ethnology, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Fortunately, there are others who recognize the
value of this kind of holistic comparative anthropology,
and I would point to the work of the Comparative Austronesian Project of the Australian National University
as a marvelous example of the intellectual fruits that
can come of a phylogenetic model (Bellwood, Fox, and
Tryon 1995, Pawley and Ross 1994).
m a l c o l m ro s s
Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University, P.O. Box
1428, Canberra, A.C.T. 2601, Australia. 1 viii 96
I find two major trains of thought on linguistic matters
in Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden’s article.
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 183
The first is a strong opposition to ‘‘the assumption
that core bundles of traits—in language, customs, and
genes—remain intact over long periods of time and vast
geographic distances’’ and an objection to the ‘‘conventional wisdom’’ that language is ‘‘a reliable guide to cultural ethnicity and human biology.’’ Instead, the authors argue that the distributions of language, culture,
and genes are often far from coterminous and that
speakers of genetically unrelated languages will in some
cases be culturally almost indistinguishable.
The second train of thought is not explicitly articulated but is inferrable from the statement that ‘‘new understanding of the geography of Pacific prehistory suggests that languages spoken in Irwin’s voyaging corridor
between island Southeast Asia and the Solomons ought
to share a discernible pattern and a reticulated common
history. They do; they are called the Austronesian family of languages.’’ My reading of this may be more extreme than the authors intend, but they appear to reject
the commonly accepted view of Austronesian linguistic
dispersal from Taiwan through Southeast Asia, New
Guinea, and the Solomons and thence into Remote
Oceania. At least, this is implicit in their denial of Bellwood’s (1988) claim that Austronesian languages dispersed through their speakers’ migration. At the same
time, the authors rebut the suggestion of a wholesale
abandonment of older languages in favour of Austronesian. That is, the ‘‘reticulated common history’’ of Austronesian languages is in their view due neither to migration nor to shift. Instead, they seem to favour a
scenario whereby the Austronesian languages have
somehow developed in situ in an area embracing the
whole of Irwin’s voyaging corridor, apparently as the
outcome of prolonged contact and language convergence. This interpretation is supported by the remark
that ‘‘the subgroupings of Austronesian languages are
not just linguistic but geographic.’’
I will comment on this second train of thought first,
as it is significantly more far-reaching in its implications than the first. At issue here is the question of how
languages come to be similar to each other and to be
treated as ‘‘related.’’ Similarity between two languages
has two kinds of origin. It occurs when two languages
share a common ancestor, and it occurs as the outcome
of contact between speakers of two languages, especially when speakers of one language also speak the
other. Crucially, however, historically attested cases
show that each kind of origin results in its own pattern
of similarity. Languages with a common ancestor inherit that ancestor’s bound grammatical morphemes
(prefixes, suffixes, infixes marking categories such as
person, number, tense, aspect, mood) and vocabulary,
reflecting the ancestor’s sound system in a regular way
(Nichols 1996). They do not necessarily inherit the ancestor’s syntax. In contrast, languages which have become similar only through contact and bilingualism
may display similar syntax but almost never have commonly inherited bound grammatical morphemes. They
may have resemblant vocabularies if substantial borrowing has occurred (contact rarely leads to borrowing
of basic vocabulary, however, and sometimes hardly in-
volves borrowing at all), but it is likely that the sound
correspondences between words in the two languages
will be irregular (Grace 1996, Ross 1996). On these criteria it is usually possible, and indeed fairly easy, to decide whether two similar languages have a common ancestor (i.e., are related) or have converged through
contact. And on these criteria it is absolutely clear that
Austronesian languages are similar to each other not
primarily through contact but because they have a common ancestor, conventionally dubbed ‘‘Proto-Austronesian.’’
The commonly accepted account of Austronesian linguistic dispersal is squarely founded on a relative chronology of innovations based on reconstructions obtained by the linguistic comparative method. The
method subgroups languages not on the basis of shared
similarities but according to the distribution of shared
innovations relative to a reconstructed protolanguage
ancestral to the whole family (in this case, ProtoAustronesian). The most significant innovations are
certain kinds of regular sound change, changes in the
structure of morphological paradigms, and idiosyncratic
sound changes in particular words. It is highly unlikely
that a substantial set of innovations will (a) arise by
chance and in parallel in each of the daughter languages
or (b) be copied in its entirety, thereby creating a semblance of shared inheritance. Hence languages which reflect such an innovation set are deemed to have shared
a period of development (i.e., in the form of a shared ancestor) apart from other languages and are said to form
a genetic subgroup. When the method is applied recursively, the result is a family tree.
This subgrouping method has been applied to the
Austronesian family by a number of scholars since
Dempwolff (1937), especially by Robert Blust (1977,
1978, 1982, 1983–84, 1993). Whilst the evidence for the
various nodes in the resulting tree is not all of equal
quality (Pawley and Ross 1993, Ross 1995), the overall
pattern strongly indicates a movement of Austronesian
languages from Taiwan into Southeast Asia and along
the ‘‘voyaging corridor’’ into Remote Oceania. A language can move essentially in two ways: because its
speakers move or because it is adopted by people who
formerly spoke another language (that is, through language shift). The authors apparently reject widespread
shift, and it is indeed difficult to conceive of the movement of Austronesian languages only or even largely in
terms of language shift: what could have motivated
group after ethnic group to abandon its language in favour of an Austronesian one? We must infer that movements of people have played a large role in the dispersal
of the Austronesian languages.
This brings me back to the authors’ first train of
thought, and here we are closer to agreement. There is,
as Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden eloquently tell us, no good
reason to suppose that linguistic continuity must entail
cultural and biological continuity. However, this mismatch of continuities itself raises questions, as the authors note. If, as in the Sepik area to which they refer,
groups of speakers have retained different languages despite commonality of culture, we need to account for
184 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
this retention. On Karkar Island, not far from the Sepik,
it is difficult to find any ethnographic difference between the Takia and the Waskia other than the fact that
they speak utterly unrelated languages, yet the languages persist, apparently as emblems of perceived separate identity (Laycock 1979, 1982). I suspect that the
same has been true in the Sepik area. At the same time,
the ongoing bilingualism implicit in this convergence
of culture has resulted in significant changes in the semantic and syntactic organisation of Austronesian
Takia on the model of Papuan Waskia (Ross 1996). If we
examine the Austronesian languages of the Sepik region
starting at Manam Island, we see increasing remodelling as we move westward, and this seems to be correlated with growing intensity of contact with speakers
of Papuan languages (Ross 1991). Perhaps it remains
true that ‘‘current linguistic . . . theory is inadequate to
account for such a state of affairs,’’ but I believe that its
adequacy is increasing.
It seems that the authors see the Sepik area as a
model for the rest of the Pacific. Whilst I would agree
that the Sepik findings are an antidote to any belief that
Pacific communities have developed in splendid isolation, there is clearly a big difference in this regard between the north coast of New Guinea and the central
Pacific (Pawley 1981, Lynch 1981). Fiji and Polynesia
had not been occupied before Austronesian-speakers
reached them, and their languages differ from many
Austronesian languages in New Guinea in being free of
the quite profound kinds of changes that contact with
Papuan-speakers has brought about in the latter.
I accept Terrell, Hunt, and Gosden’s contention that
the phylogenetic model is not a sufficient one for Pacific archaeology and anthropology. But this is not because it is wrong for language. It is because scholars
have made inferences from it which the linguistic comparative method does not warrant. The method investigates continuity and innovation in the prehistory of languages. It does not investigate the causes of innovation,
such as language contact, for which other tools are used
(Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Ross n.d.), and it provides only indirect and incomplete access to the prehistory of a language’s speakers. It may well be true that
‘‘there are good reasons to rethink the intellectual
framework of Pacific anthropology.’’ It would be ironic,
however, if a move to make Pacific anthropology more
independent of linguistics sought at the same time to
discredit Pacific linguistics and drag it in the train of a
remodelled anthropology.
Reply
j oh n e d w a r d t e r r e l l, t e r r y l. h u nt, a n d
chris gosden
Chicago, Ill., U.S.A. 4 xii 96
The obvious danger with disagreement is that it may
harden into positions to be defended at all costs. We
thank our many commentators, who have, in the main,
not allowed such a hardening of positions. We are encouraged by the support expressed as well as by the discussion and debate our paper is generating. We hope
that the issues we raise will contribute to a continuing,
productive exchange. With this goal in mind, we address a few specific points of disagreement, some of
which we think may represent misunderstanding of
what we have tried to say.
It was obvious to all that we are skeptical of portrayals of human diversity and prehistory in which language, biological endowment, and culture traits are all
said to change in the same way and at the same rate,
especially when the canvas is as broad and as ancient as
the Pacific. Several commentators feel we have conflated the circumstances of life in Near and Remote
Oceania or have used the Sepik coast as a unitary model
for the Pacific as a whole. As remarkable as it may
seem, we offer no models to replace the phylogenetic
model we distrust. Instead, we argue for recognition of
the universality of contact and influence as fundamental features of human existence—the idea, as Kennedy
puts it, that ‘‘isolating mechanisms, cultural, social,
and linguistic, need to be investigated, not assumed.’’ If
we must be said to be against anything, let it be said
that we are against assumptions about social, cultural,
and biological isolation that reduce the complexity and
variability of historical events and cultural achievements to a few elemental categories, unitary causes,
and uncomplicated human motives.
Along with Heathcote et al., we see no necessary reason that biological and cultural origins must be
linked—certainly not always, not everywhere. If isolation between human groups is absolute, covariation of
language, biology, and culture is only to be expected.
But when isolation is not an absolute (and who believes
it has ever been?) one must expect that people will learn
languages, exchange genes (and mates), and transfer
skills, beliefs, rituals, songs, fears, and objects in ways
that are profoundly difficult to analyze after the fact,
much less predict according to the dictates of a model
as simple as the phylogenetic one.
Our paper outlines an intellectual history of the comparative, phylogenetic, or cladistic approach to anthropological research and synthesis in the Pacific. This approach was explicitly espoused for historical and
comparative work in the Pacific by a number of prominent anthropologists in the 1950s. Assumptions and
simplifications underlying this approach continue to influence what scholars say about human variability and
prehistory in this part of the world. We have examined
some of these elements and explained why we question
how realistic it is to think that history is patterned like
the nodes and branches of a comparative, phylogenetic,
or cladistic ‘‘tree.’’
Part of our critique has been substantive. We have reviewed evidence not only for the antiquity of settlement in (at least) Near Oceania but also for the impact
of interaction and communication among island communities—in both Near and Remote Oceania—on culture change and development. If island populations are
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 185
not social, biological, and cultural isolates, then, as zoologists, botanists, and others know all too well, phylogenetic methods of historical reconstruction are problematic.
In light of what Goodenough, Bellwood, and Kirch say
in their comments, we are beginning to think that it can
never be said too often that the tree diagrams of historical linguistics are convenient analytical fictions. Some
too readily accept the assumptions imbedded in such
diagrams—for example, (a) that parent languages are
uniform, (b) that such primal speech communities give
birth to descendant traditions by sudden and clear-cut
splitting, and (c) that these daughter traditions subsequently change in their own separate and isolated ways.
As Bloomfield wrote, these are useful suppositions;
they are not meant to be factual claims about historical
reality, linguistic or otherwise. In spite of what common sense may tell us, the cautions raised by Bloomfield and others about these convenient simplifications
are as applicable to Pacific populations as they are to
any other on earth.
If contact among island communities continued after
the colonization of new places—and the growing body
of evidence we have reviewed supports this conclusion
even for people in Eastern Polynesia—then distinguishing ancestral from contact-induced homologies (constrained perhaps by the geography of differential isolation within Polynesia) may be an intractable research
problem. In spite of what some say, postsettlement language contacts cannot always be discerned through
careful linguistic analysis, and if caution is not observed
it is easy to conflate ‘‘degree of linguistic difference’’
and ‘‘time since language separation.’’
For example, scholars still wonder whether Easter Island was settled very early in Eastern Polynesian prehistory (a reasonable deduction given that Polynesian as
spoken on Easter Island is so different from the Polynesian spoken elsewhere) or, alternatively, Polynesian on
Easter Island is so different (and hence so seemingly antique) because people on this remote human outpost
were genuinely isolated from linguistic developments
being passed back and forth elsewhere over the centuries after the initial colonization of Polynesia (Finney
1993). As we—and others—have observed, when contact continues among speech communities, the structure of their apparent language-family tree may show us
what has been happening recently, not what happened
at the beginning of it all.
Said differently, we think it is easy to equate the
methodological eloquence of historical linguistics with
historical reality. The use and misuse of phylogenetic
models have been discussed on numerous occasions in
anthropology and the historical sciences generally. We
are somewhat surprised that some of our colleagues
may still favor the myth of the primitive isolate as an
analytical simplification, perhaps even as an accurate
portrayal, of how ‘‘early or primitive societies’’ used to
be. One social anthropologist told us not long ago, ‘‘Nobody believes that anymore.’’ We think we have now
shown him that this isn’t necessarily so.
Perhaps we do need to stress that we are not trying
to say that free-wheeling interaction was the rule in the
Pacific regardless of location, geography, voyaging
skills, motivations, and the like. Of course some people
in the Pacific have lived (and still live) more isolated
lives than others. Anyone inclined to think otherwise
should read Irwin’s (1992) explorations of how differential isolation (accessibility) may shape patterns of variability in biology, language, and culture. Such explorations are crucial to the ‘‘bottom-up’’ (rather than ‘‘topdown’’) approach to research that we favor.
Our skepticism about the application of phylogenetic
models to human history is part of a larger discourse in
anthropology today (e.g., Bateman et al. 1990, Dewar
1995, Finney 1994, Zvelebil 1995). Moore (1994b:941)
has recently taken a position similar to our own. He insists, as we do, that all of the fields, or subdisciplines,
of anthropology can help improve our understandings of
human diversity and historical processes. Doubting the
applicability of phylogenetic approaches in the human
sciences does not narrow the scope of anthropological
inquiry. Our own research work—some of which is
cited in our paper—illustrates our long-standing commitment to multidisciplinary research.
Similarly, given all that we talk about in this paper,
we are surprised that anyone would consider us unconcerned with what is being discovered in all parts of the
Pacific—even if we are reluctant to talk about Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia as separate theaters of research. In this regard, and in response to Heathcote et
al., we wish to observe that a paper that begins with
CIMA and ends with Alkire is not one that ignores Micronesia.
Grace and Finney agree with us that isolation has
been exaggerated in Pacific studies, perhaps because analysts have had a methodological stake in accepting this
simplifying condition. Through their own research
work, both of these scholars have shown all of us the
value of thinking otherwise. Grace and Finney see a
‘‘virtual paradigm shift’’ and ‘‘a new paradigm’’ abroad
these days in Pacific scholarship. Many of our own colleagues have said much the same thing. We share their
optimism about the future of Pacific research.
Harms tells us that we may help dispel the influence
of Sharp’s demeaning views about the inadequacies of
ancient Polynesian voyaging capabilities. Finney observes that the successes of modern experimental voyaging in the Pacific have probably already done so. He
suggests that Polynesians today are aware of their commonalities and are at home with ideas about their multiple (i.e., polyphyletic) origins.
Our paper is about method and theory; it does not attempt an overview of what is known about Pacific Islanders and their past. Some of the comments by Heathcote et al. imply that they wish we had attempted this
other task. The case studies we have used are not the
only ones we could have used; they are just the ones we
know best. Many readers would probably welcome an
up-to-date overview of Micronesian prehistory, and we
invite Heathcote et al. to write one. They tell us that if
we had paid more attention to Micronesia we would not
have considered it significant that geneticists have now
186 c u r r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 38, Number 2, April 1997
discovered that Polynesians, biologically speaking, cannot be derived directly from Southeast Asia. For the
most part, however, we find that Heathcote et al. are
responding to what they say we said, not to what we
actually talk about, namely, the claim advanced by
Howells and many others that ‘‘pre-Polynesians had no
important gene exchange with Melanesians before or en
route to their colonization of Polynesia proper.’’ The observation that modern Micronesian, Polynesian, and
Southeast Asian populations are ‘‘mutually much
closer affined to one another than to Melanesian populations’’ is a far cry from the old argument (which we
reject) that Polynesians and Melanesians have divergent
histories, separate cultural roots, and different biological origins.
Heathcote et al. scold us for not marshaling evidence
in defense of ‘‘our model.’’ As far as we can see, however, Clegg’s (1994) ‘‘differentiator’’ model (which they
gloss as the view that ‘‘Polynesian populations are ultimately derived from ancestors who were part of a cultural and biological continuum which linked island
Southeast Asians with Melanesians over thousands of
years’’) is congruent with our position. That they see
major disagreement where there may be none shows,
we believe, how misleading old categories like ‘‘Micronesia’’ and ‘‘Melanesia’’ can be.
We submit that the biological evidence that Heathcote et al. cite is compatible with our hypothesis that
the immediate homeland of the people who settled
Polynesia was located somewhere in Irwin’s voyaging
corridor, not Asia. On the basis of archaeological evidence, we think this ‘‘immediate homeland’’ was most
probably somewhere in the north New Guinea–Bismarck Archipelago area, that is, in the western part of
the cartographic region today labeled ‘‘Melanesia’’ (and
from his 1996 archaeological excavations at Aitape on
the Sepik coast Terrell is even prepared to argue that
these ‘‘ancestors of the Polynesians’’ were anything but
newcomers to Melanesia). Such observations, however,
have little to do with the ultimate ‘‘biological origin’’
of Polynesians, Micronesians, or Melanesians, a conundrum that we allude to but make no attempt to resolve
in our paper—largely because we doubt that ‘‘Polynesians,’’ ‘‘Micronesians,’’ and ‘‘Melanesians’’ can be defined by core bundles of traits that have stayed together
over long periods of time and vast geographic distances.
Ross expresses his confidence in the comparative
method of linguistics and in the linguist’s skill at sorting out evidence for shared ancestry from evidence for
convergence through contact. We think that linguists
have often overstated the degree of precision with
which they can make such discriminations, but we
share his enthusiasm for linguistic rigor and detail. The
comparative method in historical linguistics (like cladistics in evolutionary biology) is a logical, well-formed
way of beginning empirical research. It is not, however,
sufficient to unravel linguistic prehistory, and it is all
too easy to draw inferences about the past that the comparative method does not warrant. Fortunately, there is
growing interest in historically sensitive approaches to
language contact, language change, and the social life of
language. We anticipate that historical sociolinguistics
will be a major area of growth (thanks in part to Ross’s
own interest in it).
Ross is right that we have trouble accepting ‘‘the
commonly accepted view’’ that Austronesian ‘‘dispersed’’ from Taiwan through Southeast Asia, New
Guinea, and the Solomons and thence into Remote
Oceania as an advancing sequence—a unitary ‘‘migration’’—of A to B to C moves and language splits (Terrell
1986b:247–50). However, doubting that the linguist’s
reconstructed Austronesian family tree maps Austronesian settlement history does not mean that we think
that people in Irwin’s voyaging corridor never moved
around or that prehistory should be mapped instead as
some kind of human Brownian motion.
Goodenough reviews some of the reasons for favoring
phylogenetic interpretations of history, at least in Polynesia. Some will agree with his assessment that a capacity for long-distance voyaging (which he now acknowledges for the ancient Polynesians) need not mean that
prehistoric contacts amongst islands and archipelagoes
in ancient Polynesia were ever extensive or intensive.
He says that there was probably little interchange between Hawaii and Tahiti, the Marquesas and Tahiti,
and the Cooks and Tahiti. We obviously disagree.
Goodenough also maintains that it is normally possible
to determine phylogeny among speech communities
even in situations where there has been extensive borrowing. As we noted in our concluding section, some
kind of family-tree ordering of human similarities and
differences is nearly always analytically possible. We
disagree, however, that such orderings are more likely
to reflect shared ancestry than later events and processes.
We wish that Kirch were right that the myth of the
primitive isolate is a straw man. Unfortunately, as our
review of the literature documents, the history of science shows that there is no such thing as a truly ‘‘dead
horse’’ and ‘‘straw men’’ walk the earth (and intellectually reproduce). How else is one to understand the current heated debate, for example, about human genetic
history (Terrell and Stewart 1996)? It is true, as Kirch
says, that arguing about the frequency and importance
of interisland voyaging and contact has been a feature
of Pacific scholarship for decades; and yes, isolation is
relative. It is unclear why Kirch thinks that we think
otherwise. We have no idea why he believes that Terrell
has argued that Austronesian and Non-Austronesian
languages have a common origin in Melanesia, although those who have not read Terrell (1981, 1986b)
may not know what he has actually proposed. Those
who may be worried that we have neglected to mention
the work of A. K. Romney and his associates need look
no farther than Welsch and Terrell (1994), cited in our
paper, although a more definitive assessment can be
found in Welsch (n.d. b).
Kirch reports that the Hawaiian archipelago appears
to have been cut off from the rest of Eastern Polynesia
after about a.d. 1200 (there is some evidence suggesting
t e r r e l l , h u nt , a n d g o s d e n Social Life in the Pacific 187
a somewhat later date [see M. Allen 1996]) despite an
earlier period of multiple return-voyaging. But if voyaging to and from Hawai’i only stopped then, how are we
to interpret phylogenetic relationships within Polynesia? Certainly not as a map of ancestral relationships,
pure and simple. Where Hawai’i fits into Eastern Polynesia must be a mix reflecting ancestry and the geography of continuing contact for hundreds of years after the
first settlement of that remote archipelago.
With a subject as large and complex as the prehistory
of the Pacific, no single interpretation can encompass
the whole of historical reality. (With the prehistory of
Australia now perhaps as old as 170,000 years, that of
New Guinea cannot be far behind; and who knows what
that means?) The choice facing all of us is not simply
to accept or defend our own views. One of the benefits
of studying the Pacific is that life there is an affront to
Western commonsense notions about the world and
how things are. As Harms notes, part of our common
sense is bound up with the recent history of European
colonization, and we have some cultural unlearning to
do. We end by emphasizing again the spirit in which our
contribution was written. Some religious leaders may
be infallible, but the rest of us are not. We do not seek
to replace the 1950s agenda with new orthodoxy. We are
grateful to all of the commentators who have entered
into the spirit of productive talk.
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