Pieces of the Vanuatu Puzzle (Terra Australis 23): Archaeology of the North, South and Centre

A short note on banana (Musa) phytoliths in Lapita, immediately post-Lapita and modern period archaeological deposits from Vanuatu

“…The radiocarbon dates from different levels of the excavated deposits fall in a flat section of the calibration curve and at two standard deviations the dates are all between 2740 and 2340 BP (Bedford and Spriggs, 2008:106 and Table 1). However, the similarities in ceramics and worked shell artifacts throughout most of the depth of the mound deposits and the parallels found with material from well dated sites on the island of Efate suggest that the mound was used over a period of about only 200 years, sometime during the Early Erueti Phase (2800-2500 BP) (Bedford, 2006a) (Fig. 1).…”

Lapita subsistence strategies and food consumption patterns in the community of Teouma (Efate, Vanuatu)

“…The consumption of coastal resources detected from the d 13 C and d 15 N analysis of the Teouma human samples echoes the Vanuatu archaeological evidence. Shellfish remains are described as the predominant component of Lapita middens (Bedford, 2003(Bedford, , 2006. Shellfish are seen as having contributed to the diet of the early colonisers, and their presence in middens is regarded as indicating a general pattern of optimal gathering of the closest resources (Bedford, 2006).…”

“…Lapita populations were the first human inhabitants of the pristine environments of the east Melanesian and west Polynesian islands, arriving around 3100-2800 BP as part of the Neolithisation of Island South-East Asia and the Pacific (Anderson and Clark, 1999;Bedford, 2006;Bedford et al, 2009;Burley and Connaughton, 2007;Sand, 2007). For more than 40 years archaeological interpretations of their colonising subsistence strategies have been a matter of debate.…”

Multi-proxy records of regionally-sourced tsunamis, New Zealand

“…Like micropalaeontological evidence, the signal varies from site to site and requires appropriate expertise to interpret the data. Archaeological (Bedford, 2006;McFadgen and Goff, 2007), anthropological (King et al, 2007;Terrell et al, in press), and geomorphological (Goff et al, 2008a;Witter, 2008) proxies continue to be recognised and enhanced, and yet are rarely used.…”