from New Guinea or New Ireland, required that 60 to 90 kilometers be traversed totally out of the sight of any land. This is apparently the earliest known example of true seafaring anywhere in the world.

By 20,000 b.p., the change to moving resources to people is reflected in the appearance of obsidian from a New Britain source 350 kilometers away in two New Ireland sites. An introduced animal, the cuscus (Phalanger orientalis), also occurred in both sites at this time. This marsupial, which became an established species on New Ireland and an important food source, is the earliest of a series of animal translocations in the region and raises the possibility that useful plants and nut-bearing trees were also moved about well before the end of the Pleistocene period.

The sporadic use of caves in New Ireland in the early-Holocene period raises the contentious question of whether people were more dependent on cultivated plants and were settling down there around 8,000–10,000 years ago, as in the New Guinea Highlands. Lacking the complex evidence of later Lapita sites, some researchers continue to dismiss the various strands of supporting evidence that have emerged. These include further residues of taro and yam on various stone tools, including elaborate stemmed and hafted obsidian and chert items; the presence of domesticated Canarium nut shells in various island sites where wild forms were not endemic; several sites where up to twelve nut species indicate the presence of arboriculture; increasingly extensive distributions of obsidian from its several sources both east in the Bismarck Archipelago and west along the north coast of New Guinea; the appearance of stone and edge-ground axes, earth ovens in several sites, and pig remains in two lowland sites; and changing settlement patterns involving beachside, coastal, and inland open sites as well as caves and rock shelters on smaller offshore islands and atolls. It is thought that the model of gradual economic intensification reflected in these developments requires more substantial food productive systems than those provided solely by hunting and gathering.

Lapita

Beginning about 3500 b.p., an influx of Austronesian language speakers bringing exotic items of material culture from Southeast Asia transformed the history of the Melanesian peoples. The distinctions between the Lapita and what preceded it are so great that early researchers saw this migration of Polynesians-to-be as having little interaction with existing Melanesians other than bringing them agriculture, sailing technology, pottery, complex shell technologies, obsidian trading, prestige exchange, the pig, the chicken, and other benefits of their more complex society. Some researchers still hold such a view, but others now propose more interactive and integrative models that suggest the success and spread of Lapita depended on a greater economic and organizational parity between the indigenous groups and the new arrivals than previously thought. However, the new material culture, so dominant archaeologically, has acted to mask the prior levels of indigenous development. The island populations were ready for and receptive to the changes brought by Lapita. The mainland culture of New Guinea seems to have been bypassed or was more resistant since no Lapita-type sites occur there.

Lapita people almost immediately breached the previous barrier to Pacific expansion at the end of the main Solomons chain to occupy outlying islands in the southeastern Solomons, settle Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and reach Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. The implication that a new sailing technology existed, specifically the double-hulled canoe, is strong. In any case, new spheres of influence beyond the Bismarck Archipelago added new dimensions of oceanic distance to Melanesian relationships, distances that provided the basis for the diversity that would develop in Melanesian societies.

An increased number of sites from this period may reflect higher populations, more-sedentary settlements in coastal and inland sites, a higher visibility of sites with pottery, or combinations of all three possibilities. The introduced technology of pottery-making looms large in all assessments of Lapita. Apart from a single claim for earlier Melanesian pottery from