Oceania was the last region on earth to be permanently inhabited,
with the final settlers reaching Aotearoa/New Zealand approximately
AD 1300. This is about the same time that related Polynesian
populations began erecting Easter Island's gigantic statues,
farming the valley slopes of Tahiti and similar islands, and moving
finely made basalt tools over several thousand kilometers of open
ocean between Hawai'i, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and
archipelagos in between. The remarkable prehistory of Polynesia is
one chapter of Oceania's human story. Almost 50,000 years prior,
people entered Oceania for the first time, arriving in New Guinea
and its northern offshore islands shortly thereafter, a
biogeographic region labelled Near Oceania and including parts of
Melanesia. Near Oceania saw the independent development of
agriculture and has a complex history resulting in the greatest
linguistic diversity in the world. Beginning 1000 BC, after
millennia of gradually accelerating cultural change in Near
Oceania, some groups sailed east from this space of inter-visible
islands and entered Remote Oceania, rapidly colonizing the widely
separated separated archipelagos from Vanuatu to SAmoa with
purposeful, return voyages, and carrying an intricately decorated
pottery called Lapita. From this common cultural foundation these
populations developed separate, but occasionally connected,
cultural traditions over the next 3000 years. Western Micronesia,
the archipelagos of Palau, Guam and the Marianas, was also
colonized around 1500 BC by canoes arriving from the west,
beginning equally long sequences of increasingly complex social
formations, exchange relationships and monumental constructions.
All of these topics and others are presented in The Oxford Handbook
of Prehistoric Oceania, written by Oceania's leading archaeologists
and allied researchers. Chapters describe the cultural sequences of
the region's major island groups, provide the most recent
explanations for diversity and change in Oceanic prehistory, and
lay the foundation for the next generation of research.
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