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First Lapita Settlement and its Chronology in Vava'u, Kingdom of Tonga

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

David V Burley  and
Sean P Connaughton
David V Burley*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada
Sean P Connaughton
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada
*
Corresponding author. Email: burley@sfu.ca.
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Abstract

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Beginning approximately cal 1400 BC, Austronesian-speaking Lapita peoples began a colonizing migration across Oceania from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia. The first point of entry into Polynesia occurred on the island of Tongatapu in Tonga with subsequent spread northward to Samoa along a natural sailing corridor. Radiocarbon measurements from recent excavations at 4 sites in the northern Vava'u islands of Tonga provide a chronology for the final stage of this diaspora. These dates indicate that the northern expansion was almost immediate, that a paucity of Lapita sites to the north cannot be explained as a result of lag time in the settlement process, and that decorated Lapita ceramics disappeared rapidly after first landfalls.

Type
Articles
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , 2007 , pp. 131 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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