Date: Friday July 6th

Convener: Tarisi Vunidilo 

Collections Manager, Waikato Museum, New Zealand

 

This session aims to look at the practical ways of reaching out to our communities, and allowing local people to embrace Lapita and its meanings. Institutions and researchers are welcomed to share what they have done in their geographical area of research to reach out. The most important factor is for the landowners/indigenous or local people to be involved and included in our quest of studying Lapita. To acquire the buy in of the local people is fundamentally crucial in getting ahead in the work that we do. It is then important that we reciprocate that goodwill into something tangible for their children and future generation to benefit from.

 

 

Papers 

8:30am

"The Lapita Conference:  An Eye-Opener For Ordinary Solomon Islanders"

Lawrence Foanaota

National Museum, Solomon Islands 

 

Since Lapita pottery was first found in the early 1970s in the Santa Cruz Islands and later on in other parts of the country such as the Western Province, so much work and writing has been done by scholars, but many Solomon Islanders still have very limited knowledge or none at all about it and its existence in these islands.  So by holding this Lapita Conference in Honiara, it will certainly increase people's awareness of its existence than at present and should also interest the schools to include information on it in their teaching materials.

 

9:00am

"Archaeological research, community collaboration and wider public awareness in Vanuatu."

Stuart Bedford, Matthew Spriggs and Ralph Regenvanu

 

This paper gives a brief outline of archaeological research in Vanuatu since independence (1980) where the initiation, collaboration and direct involvement of ni-Vanuatu communities and institutions has led to an unmitigated success in terms of wider public awareness, support and understanding for such research. What has been absolutely crucial to this success is that archaeologists’ have been able to tap into an already well-established framework of community connections, namely the Vanuatu Cultural Centre fieldworker (filwoka) system. The Vanuatu Cultural Centre itself, a highly respected institution nationwide, has also initiated a number of other public education programs where archaeological information has been utilised.

 

9:30am

"The Lapita icon : moving beyond archaeology, into the real world of Oceania in the third millennium"

Christophe SAND, Jacques BOLE, André OUETCHO

Dept of Archaeology of New Caledonia
 

The Lapita icon is above all all, an archaeological “invention”. No traditional oral tradition in Oceania speaks directly about Austronesian settlers 120 generations ago, even if Pacific islanders are the descendants of these old pot-making communities. This paper wishes to present a series of experiences linked to the recent evolution of the perception of Lapita ancestry in Island Melanesia and West Polynesia, ranging from the use of the name in totally non-historical contexts to the inclusion of this part of the past in modern-day indigenous discourses and the use of Lapita graphics in contemporaneous Oceanic as well as Western-style arts. These examples will highlight how much the scientific results about the past can be reshaped in today’s societies to fit other themes, roles and issues, far from archaeology.