Word: lapita
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...recent times for cattle grazing, surrounded by a green tide of dense bush, vine and coconut palms. Some time later a village, now vanished, sprang up on top of the graves, perhaps as memory of them faded. Animal bones have been found with the remains, and large pieces of Lapita pottery appear to have been broken and placed in the grave pits. Flat pieces of coral had been placed where their heads once were, each topped with a ring made from a cone shell...
...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...
...past few decades, argument has focused on whether the Lapita people originated among Neolithic farmers of Taiwan before moving through Melanesia and into Polynesia, or whether the Lapita culture was indigenous to the Bismarck Archipelago. In Auckland, Matisoo-Smith's lab has begun the intricate task of following that trail by trying to extract dna from the bones. Only one other study of ancient dna, collected from a range of younger sites, has ever been done in the region, and it was undertaken, Matisoo-Smith says, when less rigorous protocols produced less reliable results. While her results are still incomplete...
...they suffer from malaria or other diseases? What did they eat? She's already found telltale signs of degenerative bone disease - evidence of hard physical work. Signs of malaria could reveal whether the Lapita people unknowingly brought the illness with them, while details of their diet will help tackle one of the great puzzles of the Lapita story - did some stay long enough in Melanesia to set up gardens, or were they, as proponents of the "Express Train to Polynesia" theory believe, just passing through on their way east, eating whatever they could forage along the way? "The fact 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...