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Graves of the Pacific's First Seafarers Revealed Richard Stone INDO-PACIFIC PREHISTORY ASSOCIATION CONGRESS, 20-26 MARCH 2006, MANILA Little is known about the Lapita peoples, the first settlers of the Western Pacific, other than their ubiquitous calling card: red pottery fragments with intricate designs. But in what's being hailed as one of the most dramatic finds in years, researchers at the meeting offered a glimpse of the first-known early Lapita cemetery. "This is the closest we're going to get to the first Polynesians," says archaeologist Matthew Spriggs of Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra, a member of the excavation team. Face...

'Saipan may be Pacific's oldest archaeological site' By Marconi Calindas Reporter Thursday, November 10, 2005 Sediment cores taken from Saipan's Lake Susupe in 2002 have yielded a continual record of plant pollen and other materials for the past 8,000 years that could make the island one of the oldest archaeological site in the Pacific, according to the Historic Preservation Office. HPO director Epiphanio E. Cabrera said that scientists who have been working with the CNMI recently announced new evidence that could push the date for the earliest human settlement in Micronesia back to nearly 5,000 years ago. Cabrera said researchers...

The Pacific's Pompeii 11.09.2004Stuart Bedford displays a piece of Lapita pottery. Picture/ Amos Chapple When New Zealand archaeologist Dr Stuart Bedford was handed a large piece of ancient broken pottery in Vanuatu this year he thought it was a joke. At Port Vila for a wedding, all thoughts of the nuptials deserted him as he stared at the piece of highly decorated Lapita pottery. "I thought I must have been in another country," he said. Finds of Lapita, the distinctive patterned pottery that marks the movement of the first settlers into eastern Melanesia and western Polynesia, are relatively uncommon on...