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The Archaeology of Lapita Dispersal in Oceania: Papers from the Fourth Lapita Conference, June 2000, Canberra, Australia. Edited by G. R. Clark, A. J. Anderson, and T. Vunidilo. Terra Australis 17. Canberra: Pandanus Book, Australian National University, 2001. viii + 222 pp. ISBN 1-74076-010-7.
Since the Lapita Homeland Project (LHP) in the Bismarck Archipelago in 1985, there has been a string of conferences relating to Lapita pottery, its predecessors and successors. Originally, the conferences were designed as a forum for reporting on the outcomes of the LHP, but from 1988 the format was broadened beyond this narrow geographic focus, and now covers the western Pacific Islands from New Guinea to New Caledonia and Fiji-Tonga. The temporal boundaries are also broader than the few hundred years of the span of Lapita pottery.
The 2000 conference was originally planned to take place in Fiji, but the venue was relocated to Canberra following the Fijian coup attempt, just two weeks before the start of the conference. This relocation had several impacts on the conference, not least the reduction in non-Australasian participation, as many North American and other colleagues were unable to rearrange at the last minute their schedules and itineraries to accommodate the additional travel. This meant the absence of a number of significant 'players' in the region's archaeology, and a reduction in the overall scope of the conference papers. The resulting volume, however, is a significant one in its own right.
The volume contains 19 of the 40 or so papers presented, covering a wide range of topics, places, and periods, though the period prior to Lapita is dealt with only in general terms in some papers. Geographically, the papers cover the Bismarcks (Summerhayes on Lapita chronology in the Arawe and Feni Island groups; Parr et al. on phytoliths and landscape-subsistence reconstruction on Garua Island; Leavesley on New Hanover earth mounds of uncertain age; Smith on Arawe shell artifacts; Torrence and White on Lapita faces from Boduna Island), Solomon Islands (Felgate on the Roviana pottery sequence), Vanuatu (Bedford on Malakula pottery; Spriggs and Bedford on possible Lapita at Mangaasi; Bedford and Clark on incised and relief pottery of Vanuatu and Fiji), New Caledonia (Sand on nonceramic artifacts), and Fiji (Parke on Vanua Levu pottery handles; Szabo on...