The Lapita and Remote Oceania
Navigators cross open ocean to islands no one had ever reached.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 600 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
The Lapita culture, marked by finely dentate-stamped pottery, appears in the Bismarck Archipelago around 1500 BCE and within a few centuries reaches Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa — crossing hundreds of kilometres of open water beyond sight of land. This is the first human settlement of Remote Oceania, and it requires deliberate voyaging with provisioned canoes carrying crops and livestock. Their descendants become the Polynesians.