Word: digging
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...years, farmers there grow enough food for their families plus a bit extra that they can sell or store away. But the past couple of years have been tough. Last year a swarm of locusts and poor rains ruined most of the crop, forcing the people of Niger to dig into their reserves. The next crops won't be ready until later this year. Until then, thousands of people will go hungry. "Whole families are suffering because of a desperate shortage of food, which has forced them to eat just one meal a day of maize, leaves or wild fruits...
Under the wide and starry sky,/ Dig the grave and let me lie..." You know you're on a true literary pilgrimage when your taxi driver can recite Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem in the time it takes to wind five kilometers up the hill from Apia to the old plantation home of Vailima. It was here that the Scottish writer (1850-1894) - who blended boy's-own adventure with psychological insight and a sense of history in such tales as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Body Snatchers - came...
...first arrived in this part of the world. Never before has such a large collection of skeletal remains from these early wanderers, known as the Lapita people, been found. Excavations by an international team working with the Vanuatu National Museum began last year, followed by a second, more extensive dig, which finished last week. The finds of just two seasons' work, covering only a small part of the site, have left Pacific prehistory hunters unable to contain their glee. "It's the site we've all been looking for, the site we were hoping might exist," says Lisa Matisoo-Smith...
...Most previous Lapita pottery finds have been too damaged for repair - few are in as good shape as those being unearthed at Teouma, and the team hopes several objects can be fully restored. The last week of this year's dig produced an extraordinary pottery bird, never before seen in the Pacific, one of three originally on the rim of a pot which contained human bones and was decorated with mouthless human faces. The birds were perched looking into the bowl: "God knows what that means," says Spriggs. Such objects will make priceless museum pieces. But the answers that...
...major Lapita conference begins this week in Tonga, and Matthew Spriggs expects the audience to be "stunned" by news from Teouma. He won't be surprised to find hundreds more burials there, meaning years of work ahead. In the meantime, the bones from this year's dig, carefully washed and packed, will soon follow Hallie Buckley to the University of Otago in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand - the last place settled by Polynesians in their sweeping colonization of the Pacific. Now their ancestors are following them there. Even in death, the Lapita people's travels continue...