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area have placed severe stress on the archaeological resources, so the Department of Antiquities is constantly engaged in rescue excavations and related mitigation programs.
Palaepaphos, 15 kilometers east of Nea Paphos, was an important center in earlier periods and the center of the ancient cult of Aphrodite. This area has been extensively explored by a long series of archaeologists, including some working for the Cyprus Exploration Fund (1888), T. B. Mitford and J. H. Iliffe (1950– 1953), and David Rupp’s long-running Canadian Palaepaphos Survey Project. Material from a late–Bronze Age sanctuary at the site was reused in the construction of the Roman Temple of Aphrodite and subsequently in the building of a medieval sugar mill. Excavations since 1966 by F.-G. Maier have covered a variety of sites, including the siege mound used by the Persians when they besieged and took the city in the fifth century b.c.
One of the central theaters of anthropological research for a century, Melanesia has been systematically explored archaeologically only since the 1950s. Before that time, collections of Melanesian material culture were made, sometimes haphazardly, by explorers, sailors, missionaries, government officials, and anthropologists. Such collections sometimes included archaeological materials, which have subsequently taken on great scientific value. These materials have formed, with written descriptions of traditional Melanesian behavior by the same explorers and anthropologists, a rich ethnographic background on which some of the central themes of Melanesian archaeology have been predicated.
The University of Auckland in New Zealand was influential in opening up archaeology in the eastern Melanesian islands in the 1950s, and there is a similar connection between the 1960s development in Australian universities of formal archaeology courses and research into Australian archaeology and the development of archaeological research in western Melanesia. Fundamental to these developments was the appointment of jack golson to the Australian National University in the early 1960s. Within a couple of years of arriving in Australia, Golson, already experienced in Pacific archaeology from a previous appointment at the University of Auckland, had graduate students working in the New Guinea Highlands, the Bismarck Archipelago, and further afield in New Caledonia and Tonga.
In the Melanesian islands a compelling theme for investigation already existed, comprising some disparate and dated threads of evidence that had recently come together: decorated potsherds collected in the early 1900s by a German missionary on Watom Island, off the coast of New Britain, and deposited in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris; a 1920s expedition to Tongatapu in western polynesia where similar pottery excavated by American archaeologist W.C. McKern from midden sites went unrecognized; and the recovery of more of this pottery in the 1940s on the Île des Pins off New Caledonia by J. Avias, who recognized the similarity of the designs on his material and those on the Watom shards.
Not long afterward, E.W. Gifford, from the University of California, led archaeological expeditions to Fiji and then to New Caledonia where he excavated more decorated pottery from a site called Lapita, first reported in 1917 by Frenchman M. Piroutet. Charcoal from the site was submitted for dating by the new radiocarbon technique and produced surprisingly old dates of 2500–3000 b.p. Gifford recognized that a distinctive, highly decorated, and almost identical form of pottery, now called Lapita after Gifford’s New Caledonian site, occurred in sites stretching from the Bismarck Archipelago to Tonga.
It was a small and inevitable step to link evidence from Lapita sites to long-standing questions concerning Polynesian origins first posed by English explorer Captain James Cook. Golson, himself involved in Lapita research in the second half of the 1950s from his Auckland base, proposed in 1961 that a “community of cultures,” stretching the length of Melanesia and
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