Abstract
Early Lapita sites, concentrated in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, represent the first steps by Austronesian-speaking populations into the Western Pacific (Pawley 2007; Summerhayes 2010a), a journey which would eventually see these peoples occupy some 293 known locations from Near Oceania through to Tonga and Samoa in Remote Oceania (Bedford et al. 2019:8). Lapita is an archaeologically reconstructed culture associated with the introduction of pottery into the Pacific region by groups of people from Island Southeast Asia, who interacted with indigenous populations and were the first inhabitants of the Remote Oceanic islands. Dating to ca 3300—3100 cal. BP