Lapita culture, << lah PEE tuh >>, is a prehistoric culture of the western Pacific Ocean known for its distinctive pottery. Archaeologists named the culture after a site on the island of New Caledonia where the pottery was first discovered. The Lapita culture first arose about 3,500 years ago in the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago, a group of islands northeast of New Guinea. The Lapita people were farmers, craftworkers, and accomplished seafarers. They were the first people to explore and settle islands in the vast Pacific Ocean east of the Solomon Islands. By 3,000 years ago, the Lapita people had settled on the islands that became known as Fiji, New Caledonia, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu.
The finest Lapita pottery was elaborately decorated with dentate (toothlike) stamps. Sometimes, the patterns represented a human face and eyes. The striking style is easily recognized, and the pottery is often found among other relics of Lapita life, such as stone tools. Most archaeologists therefore think that the people who used, made, and traded the pottery shared a common culture. This culture spread across the Pacific Ocean as far east as Tonga.
Scientists think that the ancestors of the Lapita people originated in what is now southeastern China and Taiwan. Their language belonged to the Austronesian language family, which also originated in that region. This language family also includes the Malayo–Polynesian languages spoken throughout much of the Pacific. The Austronesians made large ocean-going canoes with outriggers (stabilizing floats) and sails. They migrated through Southeast Asia to the northern coast of New Guinea before settling in the Bismarck Archipelago. There, they intermarried with local people who had lived in the region for thousands of years. Lapita culture developed from a combination of this Austronesian heritage and local traditions. The Lapita people then used ocean-going canoes and innovative navigation to find new islands to colonize in the Pacific Ocean.
Lapita people built large villages near beaches and on small islands near shore. They sometimes built the houses on stilts over the water. Fishing provided an important source of food for the Lapita people. They also grew crops, including coconut, taro, and yam. They raised chickens, dogs, and pigs. Lapita people traded obsidian, a volcanic glass used to make fine stone tools, from the Bismarck Archipelago as far as Tonga, a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers).
By about 2,000 years ago, Lapita culture had faded. Pottery from this period is less easy to recognize. Archaeologists think that long-distance ocean trading networks shrank. As a result, on remote Pacific islands local cultures were left to develop their own customs.
Many modern Pacific Islanders descend from the Lapita people. The Lapita people mixed with other peoples and later immigrants in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Fiji. To the east, Polynesian cultures directly descended from Lapita settlers in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. The dentate designs of the Lapita culture survive as a popular pattern in Polynesian tattooing.
