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The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World. By PATRICK VINTON KIRCH. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. Pp. xxv + 353. $77.95 (cloth); $30.95 (paper).
The Lapita Peoples is an ambitious project for a series; edited by Peter Bellwood and Ian Glover, it is dedicated primarily to the living cultures of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. How can one breathe life into mute artifacts left behind by peoples that must have been gone for some 2,500 years? An archaeologist of Lapita culture must infer even the most basic social facts from fragmentary remains of pots and other refuse, or from word lists of a posited protolanguage, where anthropologists and historians, the usual authors for a series such as this, can draw upon more or less direct observation and testimony. Artifacts that provide some direct link to their producers, such as the iconic two-inch human faces that stare out from complex geometric pottery designs or the human figure carved into a small piece of porpoise bone, are unusual finds at only a few of the approximately one hundred sites that have yielded remains of the Lapita culture. And although it is possible to reconstruct words spoken by some, if not all, Lapita peoples, it is rarely possible to deduce their precise meanings. That scholars disagree about fundamentals such as where Lapita culture developed, whether its people spoke one or more languages, and which of the Pacific Island cultures are descended from the Lapita peoples, only compounds the inherent difficulties of the project.
The established facts of the Lapita archaeological record reveal one of the greatest migrations in world prehistory. The culture's distinctive archaeological characteristic is a pottery design system in which geometric motifs are stamped with a toothed tool into the wet clay of certain fairly elaborate vessel forms following a regular set of rules....