stamping becomes coarser, and gradually this decoration technique is replaced by incising and appliqué techniques and, more frequently, undecorated pots, although the latter always formed some component of the Lapita pottery style, even in its earliest period. Fluctuations in the nature and extent of the overseas movements of obsidian from sources in the Manus and New Britain and other goods also occurred during the Lapita period. Put most simply, an initially large areal system gradually became a series of more-localized and probably more-specialized areal systems that gradually disconnected from each other.

Throughout island Melanesia, subsequent widespread incised and applied relief pottery traditions demonstrate local evolution. In some areas pottery technology eventually disappeared altogether, whereas in other areas particular villages or groups of villages became specialized pottery producers. In some localities the earliest local styles of incised and applied relief pottery may be directly descended from Lapita; in others they appear disconnected.

The south coast of Papua provides one example of local development. There, the people remained steadfastly aceramic throughout the Lapita development, but about 2000 b.p. Austronesian settlers occupied beaches, headlands, offshore islands, and even some inland locations along 800 kilometers of coastline. In something of a Lapita replay, the earliest sites were linked by similar elaborately decorated pottery, obsidian from Fergusson Island in the D’Entrecasteaux Group to the east, stone adzes, and a range of elaborate shell and bone artifacts. Over the next 800 years, successive related ceramic styles occurred at various points along the coast, although local developments gradually took separate paths, and in 1200 b.p., new and different pottery styles appeared and the extent of the obsidian trade diminished.

The occupants of the small offshore island of Mailu not only gradually monopolized pottery production in their area but, by the time of European contact, engaged in warfare to monopolize the use of large trading canoes—and thus long-distance trade—in the region. A similar but distinct specialized trading system developed around Port Moresby, an area of low seasonal rainfall and infertile soil. There, the Motu people in different villages specialized in pottery and shell bead manufacture and traded year-round up and down the coast and inland, with both Austronesian and non-Austronesian villages alike, in order to satisfy their subsistence requirements. The largest expedition each year shipped up to 20,000 clay pots 400 kilometers to the Papuan Gulf to exchange for hundreds of tons of sago and canoe hulls unavailable in the expedition’s own district. This specialized system developed over some 400 years and involved coastal villages that ranged in size from several hundred to more than 1,000 people, all operating without hereditary or hierarchical social systems.

By the time of European contact, trading systems such as the one just described not only circled the coastline of New Guinea but also linked many small island groups throughout island Melanesia. Most of the systems fulfilled the dual functions of providing subsistence and social prestige for traders and recipients alike. Although Melanesia is known anthropologically for its less-structured big-man systems, hierarchical structures with hereditary chiefs are also known both ethnographically and archaeologically.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the French archaeologist Jose Garanger reconstructed the late, aceramic period of Vanuatu history by excavating chiefs’ burials remembered in local oral histories. One of the most dramatic was that of Chief Roy Mata, possibly a Polynesian immigrant, who arrived on the island of Efate 400 to 600 years ago and subjugated the local populations there and on nearby islands. He was buried on the small nearby island of Retoka with great ceremony, together with near relatives and members of clans owing him allegiance. Some apparently sacrificed themselves; others were sacrificed by force. The exact number of retainers buried with him is not clear, but there were at least fifty. The excavations tallied closely with oral traditions. Roy Mata’s body was surrounded by individuals and embracing couples, all highly decorated with shell valuables, pigs tusks, whale-tooth beads, and crocodile-tooth and calcite pendants. There were also