Lapita culture
- 21.102777777778164.79888888889Koordinaten: 21 ° 6 ' 10 "S, 164 ° 47' 56" E
Lapita is an archaeological site on the Foué Peninsula on the west coast of New Caledonia 's main island Grande Terre.
First detections
In 1908 was the German Father Otto Meyer on the island in the Bismarck Archipelago Watom a few decorated potsherds and sent them to Paris at the Musée de l' Homme, where they disappeared unnoticed in a storage room. 1920 was the anthropologist William C. McKern ( 1892-1988 ) in Tonga 3700 km distant the same ceramic. From Meyers Fund he had never heard and put forth no connection. The site Lapita ( Site WKO013 ), as locals called it the beach was only in 1947 by the ornithologist and anthropologist Edward W. Gifford ( 1887-1959 ), a former employee McKerns comprising excavated. However, he recognized the connection to the earlier findings immediately. With the then new radiocarbon dating, he determined the age of the potsherds on 2400-2800 years. Lapita is the eponymous reference for the Pacific Lapita culture. The site was discovered by surface finds of pottery with shell impressions. This pottery was already known from the islands Watom and L'Île- des-Pins. The site was excavated in a square system in artificial layers. The discovery of the site was celebrated in 2002 by an international conference in Noumea.
2004 in plantation work on the island of Efate (Vanuatu) discovered a 3,000 year old tomb of the Lapita culture with the remains of more than 60 corpses. In addition, six fully-preserved pottery from this period were recovered there. This is still the oldest find of the Lapita culture.
Lapita culture
→ Main article: Lapita culture
The Lapita culture, as Gifford called it, he wrote the so-called " Austronesians " to. They set out on Taiwan and sailed across the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea far into the Pacific Ocean. An incomparable migrations that began around 3000 BC and was discovered and settled the Pacific islands with their end.
Waga
The Lapita people had developed a type of boat called waga. An outrigger canoe with carved bow and stern characters on double hull, with Matt sails and a large platform on which people, animals and everyday objects found space. These large canoes could be up to 20 meters long.
Around 2000 BC, the Lapita people try their Wagas and her seglerisches skills in Melanesian waters. They proved to be ideal for the development of its canoes and their sailing skills by closely spaced islands of Melanesia. From the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea from the Lapita people were advancing up to the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Now the open ocean lay before them. The Lapita culture spread in the Fiji, Tonga, and reached around 1000 BC, the Samoa Islands. The connection to the old home was maintained for a long time. Wagas sailed loaded with people and goods between Polynesia and Melanesia. From the Lapita people were Polynesians.
Bronisław Malinowski spent the years 1914 to 1920 with ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea. In the Trobriand Islands, he documented the construction of Wagas. The word waga stood for all types of marine vessels. The largest boat guy who was oceangoing, had the greatest load capacity, water displacement and the most stable structure was Masawa called. Malinowski was one of the few Western visitors Melanesia, the construction of such canoes, the ( and still takes so long even today ) over months, sometimes lasted years. Detailed the cases of trees needed to maiden voyage described Similarly, Stuart Berde, an anthropologist from the United States. He spent the 1970s in a year on the island Panaeati ( Deboyne-Inseln/Papua-Neuguinea ), and explored the construction of a similar canoes. On the same island, the writer and photographer Milda Drüke documented in 2000, the seamless construction of ocean-going outrigger canoes, which is referred to by locals as waga enona, for her book Solomon Blue. The author David Lews describes in his classic We, the Navigators, as Polynesian sailors navigated by stars, clouds and currents.