Word: zealander
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Louise Curragh slyly sees herself as the Queen of Munda. Leader of the local police, the 32-year-old New Zealand constable can exercise great authority. As the only person who carries a pistol in this part of the New Georgia Islands, once known for its marauding head-hunters, in theory Curragh has power in the way Mao envisaged it. She is usually flanked by two handsome Tongan colleagues and is greeted as Luisa or Madam wherever she goes. But the reason for Curragh's secret contentment is this: 6,000 km from her home in the Bay of Plenty...
...talents are here," says Puloka. "Every time a coach visits Tonga he says, 'You've got the talent, they just need to be developed.'" Tonga's all-time brightest sports stars, rugby players Willie Ofahengaue and Jonah Lomu, both achieved fame playing for other countries, Australia and New Zealand respectively...
...that means," says Spriggs. Such objects will make priceless museum pieces. But the answers that the Teouma site may help provide are just as precious. The tussle over the origins of the Lapita and Polynesian people has boiled for more than a century, from the 1885 publication of New Zealand scholar Edward Tregear's widely debated theory that Maori were of Aryan descent, to Thor Heyerdahl's attempt, in his epic 1947 raft trip from Peru to Polynesia, to prove that South America was the Polynesians' homeland...
...well the dna is preserved," says Matisoo-Smith, who will soon send her results to a U.S. lab for replication. Hands dusty from gently loosening fragile bones with a dental pick, Hallie Buckley works in the Efate heat barefooted and in a T shirt. A biological anthropologist at New Zealand's University of Otago, Buckley specializes in prehistoric health, and the discovery of Teouma seems to her a small miracle: "It just keeps getting better." Hidden within these graves, she hopes, are clues about how the first humans in the region interacted with a pristine environment...
...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...