Deborah Smith
Sydney Morning Herald
December 13, 2007
IT WAS obvious he was special from the moment archaeologists began to unearth his 3000-year-old remains. Skulls from three other people - two men and a woman - and the jaw of a fourth person had been carefully laid to rest on top of his skeleton.
The old man was one of the mysterious Lapita people - crafters of exquisite pottery who made the last great human migration on Earth, heading out across the Pacific Ocean more than three millenniums ago, to settle Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.
His skull-filled grave is unique in an ancient cemetery on Efate, the main island of Vanuatu, where a team from Australia and Vanuatu has discovered more than 60 Lapita skeletons in a range of burial positions.
"The fact that people wanted these skulls placed on his chest suggests he was specially venerated," Professor Matthew Spriggs, of the Australian National University, says. "The reason may be because he was the leader of the expedition that first settled the island."
No one can know this for sure yet. But a chemical analysis of one of the old man's teeth has revealed he did not grow up on the island, unlike the people sharing the grave with him.
The cemetery was found four years ago near Port Vila, the capital, after a bulldozer driver digging soil for a prawn farm noticed some Lapita pottery. "This is the first time we've been able to profile this pioneering population, what they looked like, the state of their health and their diet," says Dr Stuart Bedford, of the Australian National University, another member of the excavation team.
All the skeletons are headless, suggesting a long, complicated ritual in which the skull is removed after the interred body has decomposed, to be worshipped elsewhere. Teeth were left behind in this process, which the researchers, with colleagues in New Zealand and Britain, have chemically analysed.
The chemical signature of the dental enamel reflects the origin of the water and food the person ate as a child and the results for teeth from 17 of the Lapita people are published in the journal American Antiquity.
Four people, including the old man, were outsiders, probably brought up near the coast, but they ate more plants and animals than those raised on Efate, where the diet was rich in seafood.
Three of these people who must have arrived as adults were also buried in a distinctive fashion, on their backs facing south. "I think they were the first people off the boats," Spriggs says. Two locally raised people who were buried in the same southerly way may have been their children.
"If they were not the very first colonists, then these migrants may instead reflect voyaging between communities for marriage, economic or political purposes," Spriggs says.
The research, which includes an attempt to extract ancient DNA from the remains, will help resolve the mystery of the origins of the Lapita people, whose Polynesian descendants went on to settle Hawaii and Easter Island further east.
One theory is that they came from Taiwan and moved rapidly eastwards and out into the Pacific; another is that Lapita culture arose among people living in Papua New Guinea.
A separate study of the Lapita bones by Dr Hallie Buckley of Otago University suggests some of the males suffered from gouty arthritis, which may explain the high prevalence of this condition among Pacific Islanders today.
I was about to ask if you’d posted that yet. :’)