the Sepik area of New Guinea, Lapita pottery is the first introduction of this technology to Melanesia. However, while characteristics of Lapita pottery can be found in Southeast Asia, such similarities are at present more generic than specific, not clearly antecedent in time, or both. Any clear Lapita pottery trail into the Pacific begins in the Bismarck Archipelago. Plain and decorated pots occur, with decoration being so elaborate that its presence in sites separated by thousands of miles must reflect a historically related and almost certainly socially interactive group, especially when much of the pottery seems to have been produced on a local or island level. If the pots themselves did not move far, the trading of obsidian was more extensive (although perhaps no more intensive) than in earlier times and appears to reflect a local continuity in both production and exchange.

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Dentate-stamped shard of Lapita pottery from Babase Island, New Ireland Province, late second millennium B.C.

(G. Summerhayes)

Despite claims for Pleistocene house sites in the New Guinea Highlands, Lapita sites provide us with the first clear archaeological indications of villages. No Lapita open sites have earlier preceramic deposits, and several have revealed evidence of stilt houses built over lagoons. Typically, Lapita sites contain extensive and diverse types of shell tools and ornaments, including adzes, fishhooks, vegetable peelers, armshells, and beads. Some sites have yielded diverse plant remains, and pig, dog, and fish and shellfish are typically present. Although the Lapita people were fishing agriculturists, they did not transfer rice cultivation from Southeast Asia, remaining instead dependent on root crops and fruit and nut trees.

Very little is known of Lapita social organization, and the few Lapita burials known are without grave goods. Arguments have been made for Lapita shell ornaments representing items of prestige exchange, and linguistic reconstructions suggest that some form of hierarchical structure existed. Strong and lasting social frameworks able to function at a distance seem fundamental to the transformation represented by Lapita.

Post-Lapita

Conventionally, the Lapita tradition is thought to have ended by about 2000 b.p., although various researchers have argued for both earlier and later terminal dates because the Lapita period was not static. Its stamped pottery is most elaborate in both decoration and vessel form in the earliest centuries in western Melanesia, subsequently simplifying through time and across space. The range of pot shapes diminishes, dentate