THE OFFSHORE ISLANDS OF MELANESIA AND FIJI

At present there is no clear evidence in Island Melanesia east of the main Solomon Islands for any settlement before Lapita. Enigmatic tumuli of New Caledonia and the He des Pins, which have given radiocarbon dates many thousands of years earlier (Shutler and Shutler 1975:66–7), have now been attributed to an extinct bird Sylviornis neocaledoniae (Green 1988). They may be incubation mounds for the eggs of this giant megapode rather than the work of humans, although whether we have heard the last word on this subject is another matter. Even so, we still cannot exclude the possibility that other voyaging colonists earlier than Lapita were in the area. The possibility was noted by Green (1978) and as recently as 1989 a number of archaeologists have observed:

In some respects, the case is parallel to the situation in East Polynesia, for which both short and long chronologies are proposed (Irwin 1981; Kirch 1986), and where the latest evidence appears to be closing the gap between east and west, rather than favouring one over the other. The essential difference, however, is that there was an obvious source in West Polynesia for the first colonists of East Polynesia – the descendants of Lapita itself.