The Vanuatu National Museum-Australian National University joint project at the Teouma Archaeological site in South Efate officially finished on Friday 14 July. This year's work was largely funded by the National Geographic Society, based in Washington D.C., with other contributions from foundations and universities in Australia, France, New Caledonia and New Zealand. Yet again the excavators have made many amazing discoveries.
Detailed study of the remains of the Lapita culture found at the site will take place over the next one to two years to sort out answers to the major questions about Vanuatu's first human inhabitants which the project has raised - Who were the Lapita people? Were they more like modern Polynesians or modern Ni-Vanuatu in appearance? Where did they come from? What were their lives like? Did they have the same health and disease problems 3000 years ago that modern people today suffer from?
Some preliminary answers to these questions can be found in the current Lapita exhibition at the Vanuatu National Museum, also funded by the National Geographic Society, where you can see the stunning display of complete Lapita pots found in the previous two years of excavation at Teouma. These are the oldest fully-reconstructed pots ever found in the Pacific Islands and were produced only about 300 years after pottery was first introduced to Melanesia from Southeast Asia. The only other significant collection of complete early Lapita pots can be found in the New Caledonia Museum.
The pots now on display in the National Museum are the oldest fully-reconstructed pots ever found in the Pacific Islands and were produced only about 300 years after pottery was first introduced to Melanesia from Southeast Asia
The 2006 dig produced two more complete pots and major parts of at least two others. One of them was a large pot like one already on display at the National Museum, but it has small "lugs" or handles round the sides for lifting it up. It has the usual Lapita designs on it and when found it contained only a few human toe and hand bones and tiny Cowrie shell beads. It seems to have been placed next to one of the skeletons. Luckily it was found when the Head of conservation at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Dr Colin MacGregor, was visiting Vanuatu. He was in charge of the project to stick together the four pots now on display, which involved training National Museum curator Takaronga Kuautonga in conservation techniques. This new pot has now been taken to the Australian Museum who have agreed to assist again in piecing together the many broken pieces of the pot. It should return to Vanuatu as a complete pot again in a few months.
The other complete pot found was a pot-stand, a kind of base on which round bottomed pots can be placed so that they don't fall over. It is the first complete (but broken) example of this kind of pot found from the Lapita culture and Takaronga will be conserving it at the National Museum before it goes on display along with parts of several other pots which were found this year.
As with the pots found at the site in 2004 and 2005, these ones were found in association with the burials of the earliest people to reach Vanuatu some 3000 years ago. A total of 49 burials has now been found - they include men, women and small babies but no young children, suggesting that they may have been buried elsewhere. Some of the burials contain bones of more than one person, and some are not whole skeletons but just piles of human bones of different people all mixed up. One such pile of bones found this year was sitting on top of three human jaws and below these was another skeleton fully laid out. The other burials increased the great variety of different burials positions that already made the site unique in the Pacific - there are people on their backs, some are face down, at least one was buried in a sitting position, some have their legs bent back under them, and some have their lower legs bent forward resting on top of the thighs! This last position could only be achieved after death as the tendons and knee joints had to be cut through to get the legs into this otherwise impossible position. In many burials the forearm bones had been removed after death and it was thought that they might have been taken away to be made into tools. But this year a whole pile of forearm bones was found in one place. As in previous years, none of the fully laid-out burials had heads except for the very small babies. The heads had all been removed some time after death, presumably to be kept elsewhere in memory of the people who died. But a rare discovery of two complete skulls was also made this year, seemingly placed between the legs of another skeleton. They may have been relatives of this person.
Although we cannot know the meaning of the very complicated rituals which Lapita people conducted upon the death and burial of their relatives, we can see that they must have had a very rich "kastom" life, and the death of someone was an event to be marked in a major way, with ceremonies perhaps continuing years after a person's death. People were buried, then perhaps a year later the skeleton was exposed and the skull and some other bones removed and placed elsewhere. Then later their skulls and other bones might have been buried again, either in a pot or associated with another skeleton, or as a pile of bones in a pit.
The excavation project is now over and the results will be written up in a major book and articles over the next one or two years. The bones will be studied at Otago University in New Zealand before being returned to Vanuatu. Further exhibitions are planned for the National Museum once all the final conclusions about the life of these Lapita people from Teouma have been made. Project directors Professor Matthew Spriggs, Dr Stuart Bedford and Museum Director Ralph Regenvanu then hope that further excavations can take place at Teouma in two or three years time to provide more answers to the riddle of the Lapita people and their origins.
The Directors would like to thank the Monvoisin family for allowing access to the site; the chiefs, the traditional landowners and the villagers of Eratap for their support and assistance; the National Geographic Society for providing major funding for this year's excavations; and the other funding bodies, such as the Australian Research Council, the Marsden Fund, the Pacific Biological Foundation, and the institutions that have also supported this year's and earlier excavations at Teouma.
Special mention should be made of the specialists in studying the human bones, led by Dr Hallie Buckley of Otago University (NZ) and Dr Frederique Valentin of the University of Paris. They were kept particularly busy this year as many more skeletons were found, even in the last week of the dig. The multinational team included specialists from Vanuatu, Australia, France, New Caledonia and New Zealand, and five students from University of the South Pacific in Fiji, who come from Vanuatu and Solomon Islands.
