VANUATU’s DAILY POST carries an interesting article about an archaeological find that gives further credibility to the view that some people’s of the Pacific have a Taiwanese origin. The find was discovered by accident when a bulldozer unearthed a piece of lapita pottery in a placed called Teouma. The site at Teouma was cleared and dug up to enable the construction of a commercial prawns project. When the piece of lapita was discovered, a locally trained person attached to the Vanuatu Cultural Centre was called in both to document the find and to organise a more coordinated archaeological excavation.
This was where Professor Mathew Spriggs from the Australian National University became involved. Spriggs is an household name in Vanuatu’s archaeology and has worked there for more than three decades. Further archaeological excavation at Teouma unearthed 71 headless skeletons. Spriggs opines that the heads were probably taken away for ritual purposes, a religious practice found in several societies of Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
Professor Spriggs told the Vanuatu Daily Post that archaeological evidence indicate “that the first settlers to arrive and settle in Vanuatu arrived from Taiwan via the Bismark archipelago in New Guinean and Solomon Islands four or five thousand years ago before sailing further to Vanuatu where they settled in the islands three thousand years ago”. This archaeological theory is connected to linguistic theory about the origins of the Austronesian family of languages.
“Vanuatu’s language today originally grew out of the indigenous language of Taiwanan approximately 5,000 years ago. Linguistically all the languages of Vanuatu today belong to a big language family called the Australasian Family and the furthest we can trace is in Taiwan”.
Many archaeological finds of this kind often make their apperance as favourite news items in the media. It is heartening to see the prominence that the Vanuatu Daily Post gave in talking about the find and even to provide a picture of Spriggs in his cap and beard.
However interesting the find maybe to archaeologists, geneticists and those who value historical information, the important point for cultural heritage management here is that the find was discovered by accident rather than by design. Many Pacific Island countries do not have genuine archaeological heritage management policies which are supported by a budget that can allow archaeologists to carry out regular reconnaissance and so we are left merely with contingent responses to discoveries. If accidents help us discover our history, would we be justified to hold that history is, after all, an accident?
Recent Comments