Cultural Crossroads in Central Vanuatu: 3000 Years of Migration, Transformation and Interaction in Emae Island

Aymeric Hermann1*, Stuart Bedford2,3, Edson Willie3, Iarawai Longa3, Monica Tromp4, Emilie Dotte-Sarout5, and Mona Jubert6

The islands of Central Vanuatu are at the crossroads of western Pacific cultures since the initial settlement of the region 3000 years ago. Previous excavations on Efate and the neighbouring islands have shown a succession of widely distributed pottery traditions, which suggest that the region was culturally interconnected since the Lapita period onwards. Additionally, the presence of Polynesian speaking communities in different islands indicates later migrations from the Polynesian triangle, although these still lack detailed archaeological documentation. Emae is a Polynesian Outlier in the Shepherd Islands of central Vanuatu that remained unexplored in terms of the archaeology until a collaborative project involving the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (VKS), the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the French CNRS, and the Australian National University was started in 2018. We report here on the 3 millennia long chrono-cultural sequence based on 40 test excavations and 20 AMS dates modelled in a Bayesian framework. We provide new information on the chronology of human settlement, as well as a baseline for the material culture history, inter-island interactions, and landscape transformation based on multiple proxies such as pottery, stone tools, shell and bone artefacts technology, geochemical sourcing, and analyses of wood charcoals, phytoliths and sediments. Thanks to this interdisciplinary approach we also offer new insights on interactions between Polynesians and other non-Polynesian communities and the emergence of mixed cultural traits in central Vanuatu over time.