Post‑Lapita Movements between Eastern Indonesia and Western Melanesia

Chris Ballard1*, Laura Arnold1, Tim Denham1, Beth Evans1, James Fox1, Shimona Kealy1, Ben Shaw1, Matthew Spriggs1, Ray Tobler1, and Anne Ford2

1Australian National University, Australia; 2University of Otago, New Zealand; *chris.ballard@anu.edu.au

No single discipline operating independently is capable of adequately describing and explaining key historical processes such as changes in language, group migration, or shifts in social structure. Yet we have few structured models of how to integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives in order to identify and articulate questions that would open up these topics for collaborative investigation. In this paper, we assemble insights from genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics to define a critical new area for inquiry: a distinct post‑Lapita phase of movements of people, languages, materials, and ideas out of eastern Indonesia and into western Melanesia. Overlapping but not entirely congruent results from independent studies on pottery, rock art, kinship terms, food crops and other plants, language histories, commensal animal distributions, and human DNA suggest that significant changes were introduced to New Guinea and much of Island Melanesia from sources in eastern Indonesia, or exchanged between these regions, during a period that postdates the initial Lapita Cultural Complex expansion by more than a thousand years. Our current challenge is to harness these multidisciplinary perspectives and build on their results in order to generate truly transdisciplinary research questions and programmes capable of producing more robust reconstructions of past processes.