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The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their distinct material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. The Lapita people are believed to have originated from the northern Philippines, either directly, via the Mariana Islands, or both. They were notable for their distinctive geometric designs on dentate-stamped pottery, which closely resemble the pottery recovered from the Nagsabaran archaeological site in northern Luzon. The Lapita intermarried with the Papuan populations to various degrees, and are the direct ancestors of the Austronesian peoples of Polynesia, eastern Micronesia, and Island Melanesia.
The term Lapita is now used to refer to the collection of theories regarding the origin and features of the ancestors of the people that speak the Oceanic languages. It also refers to the material culture found in excavations, especially pottery, related to these ancestral communities.
In Western Polynesia, Lapita pottery became less decorative (2025). 9781760463304, ANU Press. ISBN 9781760463304 and progressively simpler over time. It seems to have stopped being produced altogether in Samoa by about 2,800 years ago, and in Tonga by about 2,000 years ago.
In 2002, a complete human skeleton was discovered on Moturiki in Fiji. The Mana skeleton, as it was later named, was of a Lapita woman that lived in the year 800 BCE or earlier. She was buried more than 1.5 metres below the ground surface and she was covered by undisturbed layers of sand and silt sediment in which Lapita pottery was found. A large shell had been placed beneath her neck and another one between her knees, with more smaller shells also present inside the grave.
The Lapita complex has been divided into three geographical subregions or provincesː the Far Western Lapita, the Western Lapita, and the Eastern Lapita. Within the Far Western Lapita is the New Britain or Bismarck archipelago, including the area discovered by Otto Meyer in 1909. The Western Lapita includes the artifacts found within the Solomon Islands to New Caledonia. The Eastern Lapita is attributed to the Fiji, Tonga and Samoa region. Discoveries of unique patterns within the Eastern Lapita region suggest a subdivision of Early and Late Eastern Lapita variations.
Matthew Spriggs sees the Lapita as the source of Oceanic Austronesian languages and of cultural and religious concepts in much of the Pacific.
In 2011, Peter Bellwood proposed that the initial movement of Malayo-Polynesian speakers into Oceania was from the northern Philippines eastward into the Mariana Islands, then southward into the Bismarcks. An older proposal was that Lapita settlers first arrived in Melanesia via eastern Indonesia. Bellwood's proposal included the possibility that both migration patterns happened, with different migrants taking different routes. Bellwood's proposal is supported by the pottery evidence: Lapita pottery is more similar to pottery recovered from the Philippines (at the Nagsabaran archaeological site on Luzon Island) than it is to pottery discovered anywhere else. Other evidence suggests that the Luzon area may have been the original homeland of the stamped pottery tradition that is carried forward in Lapita culture.
Archaeological evidence also broadly supports the theory that the people of the Lapita culture are of Austronesian origin. On the Bismarck Archipelago, around 3,500 years ago, the Lapita complex appears suddenly, as a fully-developed archaeological horizon with associated highly developed technological assemblages. No evidence has been found on the archipelago of settlements in earlier developmental stages. This suggests that the Lapita culture was brought in by a migrating population, and did not – as had been proposed in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars like Jim Allen and J. Peter White – evolve locally.
There is evidence that western Melanesia was continuously occupied by indigenous Papuans beginning between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. That evidence includes recovered artifacts. But those remnants of the older material culture are far less diverse than the relics dating from after the Lapita horizon. The older material culture appears to have contributed only a few elements to the later Lapita material culture: some crops and some tools.
The vast majority of the Lapita material-culture elements are clearly Southeast Asian in origin. These include pottery, crops, paddy field agriculture, domesticated animals (chickens, dogs, and pigs), rectangular , tattoo chisels, quadrangular adzes, polished stone chisels, outrigger boat technology, trolling hooks, and various other stone artifacts. Lapita pottery offers the strongest evidence of an Austronesian origin. It has very distinctive elements, like the use of the red slips, tiny punch marks, dentate stamps, circle stamps, and a cross-in-circle motif. Similar pottery has been found in Taiwan, the Batanes and Luzon islands of the Philippines, and the Marianas.
The orthodox view, advocated by Roger Green and Peter Bellwood, and accepted by most specialists today, is the so-called "Triple-I model" (short for "intrusion, innovation, and integration"). This model posits that the Early Lapita culture arose as the result of a three-part process: "intrusion" of the Austronesian peoples of the islands of Southeast Asia (and their language, materials, and ideas) into Near Oceania; "innovation" by the Lapita people, once they reached in Melanesia, in the form of new technologies; and "integration" of the Lapita peoples into the pre-existing (non-Austronesian) populations.Greenhill, S. J. & Gray, R. D. (2005).Testing Population Dispersal Hypotheses: Pacific Settlement, Phylogenetic Trees, and Austronesian Languages. In: The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: Phylogenetic Approaches. Editors: R. Mace, C. Holden, & S. Shennan. Publisher: UCL Press.[1] The Mana skeleton, a complete skeleton of a Lapita woman that lived in Fiji in 800 BCE, had her face reconstructed with the use of computer modelling. Her facial features bear similarities to those typically associated with Polynesians, Fijians and Asians ancestry, however she does not clearly align with any one of these groups.
Recent DNA studies show that the Lapita people and modern Polynesians have a common ancestry with the Atayal people of Taiwan and the Kankanaey people of the northern Philippines.
A 2023 study states that Lapita people already have increased Northeast Asian ancestry (~21–29%) compared to ancient groups that initially settled in Taiwan (~0–8%).
In the 1950s, Edward Winslow Gifford, who assisted McKern in 1920, led expeditions that eventually centered on the beach of the Koné Peninsula from where the Lapita term was coined. Gifford used the recently invented carbon dating on his excavated charcoal, dating the artifacts between 2,800 and 2,450 Before Present. Gifford later demonstrated the connection between the evidence from previous discoveries, including Meyer's Watom islands sherds and McKern's Bayard Dominick expedition. Gifford also proved a relationship between his Lapita artifacts and those discovered by Pieter Vincent van Stein Callenfels along the Karama River in Sulawesi. The time scale of the Lapita model between these discoveries and additional excavations were proven in the 1960s by Jack Golson, predating the Melanesian cultures and other Western Polynesian cultures. Some of the notable archeological locations include the Lolokoka site in Niuatoputapu and within the Eastern Lapita, the Nenumbo site in the Reef Islands which includes the expansion to the Solomon Islands, and the Talepakemalai in Mussau Island that exemplifies the earliest Lapita group within the Bismarck archipelago.
Other early Lapita discovery sites dating back to 900 BCE are also found in Tonga and contain the typical pottery and other archaeological "kit" of Lapita sites in Fiji and eastern Melanesia of about that time and immediately before.
Anita Smith compares the Polynesian Lapita period with the later Polynesian Plainware ceramic period in Polynesia:
"There do not appear to be new or different kinds of evidence associated with plain-ware ceramics (& lapita), only the disappearance of a minor component of material culture and faunal assemblages is apparent. There is continuity in most aspects of the archaeological record that appears to mimic post Lapita sequences of Fiji and island Melanesia (Mangaasi and Naviti pottery)."
Plainware pottery is found on many Western Polynesian islands and marks a transitional period between when only Lapita pottery was found and a later period before the settlement of Eastern Polynesia when the Western Polynesians of the time had given up pottery production altogether. Archaeological evidence indicates that plainware pottery ceases abruptly in Samoa around 1 CE.
According to Smith, "Ceramics were not manufactured by Polynesian societies at any time in East Polynesian prehistory."
Matthew Spriggs stated: "The possibility of cultural continuity between Lapita Potters and Melanesians has not been given the consideration it deserves. In most sites there was an overlap of styles with no stratigraphic separation discernible. Continuity is found in pottery temper, importation of obsidian and in non-ceramic artefacts".Matthew Spriggs, The Lapita Cultural Complex, 1985.
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