In archaeological time and on a world scale, the colonisation of the remote Pacific was an explosive expansion that touched the continents of Australia and America and then withdrew as voyaging declined to the extent described at European contact. Although prehistorians will continue to fine-tune the results of radiocarbon dating, the broad chronological pattern of evidence will remain.

The colonisation of this island world by sailing canoes was necessarily influenced by various natural factors and probabilities, which are reflected in outline by aspects of archaeological evidence, such as the order of island settlement. Many theories about the variability seen at contact among Pacific people in language, biology and culture associate this in some way with the nature of the founder populations, and it is presumed that diversification was an integral part of colonisation. However, sometimes the very speed of it may have outstripped presumed changes, and some patterns are clearly the result of post-settlement change, which took place in the context of ongoing voyaging. Since voyages of exploration were conventionally two way, new and initially small settlements would be influenced by further contacts. The voyaging tradition that established founder populations maintained links between them. We can expect that islands began to diverge faster, in isolation, from the time effective communication between them slowed or ended, rather than when contact between them began. While colonisation set part of the Pacific pattern, it has yet to be realised how continuing voyaging provided another dimension to post-settlement change.