Word: islanded
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...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...
Facing each other in a tight circle, fingers spread and palms making a sharp crack as they clap, the men of the village of Ianapus tattoo the dark ground with their rhythmic stomping. In contrast to the chaotic rainforest that covers most of their island of Tanna, the surface of the men's dancing ground is bare earth, compacted and smooth from countless years of ritual. Today their strong voices sing here for the success of the yam harvest and the bounty of gardens to come. Young boys, clad like their fathers and uncles only in the nambas, or penis...
...laden branches of wild mandarin trees hang over small, dark-roomed dwellings thatched with leaves, and dogs and pigs lie in the dust. The tourists who fly half an hour south to Tanna from Port Vila, the capital, come mainly to see the molten belching of Mt. Yasur, the island's live volcano, and rarely visit places like this, self-sufficient communities connected to the world beyond their borders by little more than a web of narrow walking tracks. Money isn't seen here much, either. While few Tannese villagers still favor the nambas or grass skirts seen in Ianapus...
...father and chose the Bible 30 years ago. A former president of Vanuatu's National Council of Chiefs, he is among the most senior of Tanna's 300 chiefs in a community where such men still wield great power. It was his idea to make Tanna the only island to record its kastom law in writing, a feat it completed in 1995, and though he worships in a church, at the same time Numake lives very much as kastom dictates. He embodies the meeting of two worlds found in many of his fellow ni-Vanuatu: a Western-dressed world traveler...
...Tanna's brushes with the outside world have not always been happy. Explorers, whalers, traders and blackbirders snatching laborers for the canefields of Queensland all figure in the island's memory. Missionaries arrived in the 1840s; the sterner among them tried to stamp out the arranged marriages, kava drinking and other rituals that underpin Tannese kastom life. Today, a jumble of Christian groups still jostle for believers. But the history of contact is brief enough that the first local person to fly in a plane - a young woman sent because the chiefs were suspicious of the strange craft - is still...