recognized by the commonality of Lapita pottery in the sites, could be identified as the ancestors of the historic western Polynesian cultures. Accordingly, to further substantiate this view, Golson, now at the Australian National University, dispatched graduate students to Watom, the Île des Pins, and Tonga to carry out more detailed excavations.

A second thread of Melanesian archaeology was simultaneously evolving in Papua New Guinea. In 1959, the anthropologist Ralph Bulmer worked in the New Guinea Highlands with his archaeologist wife, Sue Bulmer, and it was she who conducted the first professional excavations in that country. The combination of an archaeologist and an anthropologist interested in biology and ecology as well as prehistory resulted in their seminal joint article, “The Prehistory of the Australian New Guinea Highlands,” in a special issue of American Anthropologist in 1964. Meanwhile, the first Pleistocene date for human occupation in Australia had been announced. New Guinea, part of the same landmass during lowered Pleistocene sea levels, was one potential route of human entry onto this huge continent. Researchers set out to develop spatial and chronological frameworks for humans in the highlands, a direct counterpart to similar exploratory archaeology being initiated in northern Australia at that time.

In 1968, Ralph Bulmer became Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the newly formed University of Papua New Guinea, and he appointed Jim Allen to a lectureship in prehistory the following year. Sue Bulmer and Allen began projects delineating the prehistory of Port Moresby, which helped facilitate a further series of Australian National University graduate projects along the south Papuan coast. By the end of the 1970s, this area was, archaeologically, the best known region in Papua New Guinea.

From the beginning, systematic archaeology in Melanesia separated along colonialist lines, with Australian scholars taking the lead in Papua New Guinea, the French in New Caledonia and Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides), and the New Zealanders in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. Of course, such a generalized division of interests always has exceptions, and a smattering of American and other scholars also contributed. Today, the territorial prerogatives have fragmented as indigenous archaeologists have taken over the responsibility for their histories through a strong system of museums and cultural centers in each of the Melanesian nations. Outside archaeologists interact with them and each other on the basis of specialized research interests facilitated by regular specialized conferences within the region. Several large-scale projects, such as the Southeast Solomons Culture History Project of the early 1970s and the Lapita Homeland Project of the mid-1980s, have shown the value of multipersonnel approaches to this geographically disparate region, and a number of current projects are now using the same team-based and interdisciplinary strategy.

Such a developmental process of research has not yet produced a coherent regional prehistory for Melanesia. Lapita, an exception, is a recognizable archaeological horizon that makes archaeological sense and comprehensible narrative history, factors that explain the time and effort put into Lapita research and the emphasis put on it in syntheses of Pacific prehistory. Post-Lapita archaeology, on the other hand, too often consists only of lists of poorly described ceramic types and other artifacts from sites that frequently depend heavily on local ethnographies for coherence. If there are behavioral themes linking the later archaeologies of the separate island groups, they are yet to be convincingly articulated. At the same time, a number of researchers have sought to come to terms with the particular constraints of their oceanic world by developing theoretical perspectives, whether culture-historical, sociopolitical, economic, or ecological, that are quite advanced for the relative infancy of their subject.

Pre-Lapita

Modern humans crossed from island southeast asia into the Australasian region some time before 40,000 b.p. Homo erectus had reached Java a million years earlier but had failed to cross the water barriers further east. The biogeographical boundary called the Wallace line separated the primates, carnivores, elephants, and ungulates of Asia and the terrestrial marsupial fauna of