The Perils of Colonial Archaeology
Scott Hamilton
Mele Plain is one of my favourite places in the Pacific. It separates the jungly highlands of Efate, Vanuatu's capital island, from the sheltered waters of Mele Bay.
The plain was once dominated by French-owned plantations worked by imported Vietnamese (the character Bloody Mary, from James Michener's South Pacific and the subsequent musical, made the Vietnamese of the New Hebrides visible to the West). After World War Two many of the Vietnamese formed a branch of the Viet Minh, and protested for better wages and repatriation. Many left in the late fifties after North Vietnam defeated France and won independence. During the ni-Vanuatu fight for independence in the seventies the plantations were occupied, and after independence in 1980 their land was given to a trust run by locals. The plain's soil is incredibly fertile, and huge flowers grow wild between lines of paw paw and mango trees.
In 1964 Mele Plain was the site of one of the most bizarre 'discoveries' in the history of archaeology. French scholar Jose Garanger had been ranging Efate and its offshore islands, surveying sites and making small excavations. He would later becoming famous for digging up the grave of the legendary ruler and social reformer Roi Mata on Eratoka Island. Garanger found the grave after interviewing ni-Vanuatu traditional storians. His discovery was cited as proof that oral history can preserve important facts about the past. But on Mele Plain Garanger reported finding things that had left no trace in local memory.
Mele village sits by the sea at the end of the plain. Its people speak a Polynesian language, rather than the Southern Oceanic tongues that predominate in Vanuatu (a separate village called Maat has been established nearby in recent times by migrants from Ambrym Island, in central Vanuatu). Garanger wandered through a series of gardens just beyond Mele village and found fourteen mysterious pottery sherds.
The sherds lacked the dark geometric shapes incised on the ancient Lapita pottery that is found in many parts of Vanuatu. They had been made in Japan, about five thousand years ago, by members of the Jomon civilisation. Jomon pots are distinctive because their surfaces were marked, often haphazardly, by twisted cords. Garanger's sherds were baffling, because there had been no previous evidence of either direct or indirect contact between the Jomon and the South Pacific. Nor was there evidence that later peoples like the Ainu and the Japanese had known about or visited the region.
The Japanese archaeologist Yoshihiko Sinoto was fascinated by Garanger's sherds. He visited the Mele Plain, hoping to find more. But Sinoto found nothing. His colleague Mary Shutler did some test excavations on the edge of Mele village, but also came up empty-handed.
But Sinoto, Shutler, Garanger were not discouraged. Along with several other archaeologists, they produced a paper that tried to solve with the mystery of the Mele sherds. They discounted the idea that the sherds might have been brought to Efate by a nineteenth or twentieth century visitor. Collectors, they pointed out, were interested in whole pots, not small fragments.
It was also very unlikely, they decided, that Vietnamese migrants had brought the pottery. Sinoto, Garanger and co thought it is possible, though, that the sherds arrived with a group of Jomon who drifted to Efate thousands of years ago. They note the history of epic drift journeys across the Pacific. Such journeys still happen. In 2014, for example, Jose Alvarenga, a fisherman from El Salvador, drifted all the way from the waters off his homeland to the Marshall Islands.
But Sinoto, Garanger and co also suggested that Jomon contact with Melanesia might have been more deliberate. They pointed to similarities between pottery found in northern New Guinea and Jomon ceramics, and claimed that sherds found in Fiji's Lau archipelago have Jomon-like decorations. I read their paper with growing excitement.
It's always electrifying to learn about hitherto unknown connections between distant islands and peoples. I remember the thrill of examining figures carved in the beach rock of Tonga's Ha'apai islands, and seeing how similar they were to carvings made far away in Hawai'i. David Burley, who has spent much of his career excavating Tonga, regards the Ha'apai glyphs as definitive proof of ancient contact between two very distant parts of Polynesia. The link between Ha'apai and Tonga also reinforces our appreciation of the seafaring abilities of the Polynesians, and of the phenological and astronomical knowledge that would have supported their voyaging.
The revelation of links between Jomon and Melanesians would be even more extraordinary. I plunged deeper into the literature on the Mele sherds, hoping to find evidence for such a link. I was soon disappointed.
In 2009 Elizabeth Shutler and several colleagues walked back the claims in the earlier paper. They had a new explanation for the Mele mystery: Garanger had made a mistake.
Shortly before Garanger headed to the South Pacific in 1964, a colleague at his Paris museum had travelled to Japan, where he had been presented with fifteen pieces of Jomon pottery. The pottery came from the northern tip of Honshu Island. Tests show that the sherds Garanger claimed to have discovered on Efate came from the same area. It seems that the gift Garanger's colleague brought back somehow became mixed with material that he brought home from Efate. The 2009 paper also showed that Mele was underwater five thousand years ago, when the pottery Garanger 'discovered' was made.
I felt rather deflated to read Shutler and co's conclusions. Sometimes solving a mystery means killing a beautiful idea. I had the same sinking feeling when I explored the literature about the 'dingo' of Pukapuka Island. In the early nineties archaeologists dug up that remote atoll in the far north of the Cooks, and announced that they'd found the skeleton of a dingo. The idea that an Australian animal had been brought to an island thousands of kilometres away was extraordinary, and yet just about believable. A Polynesian adze has been found at Dark Point in northern New South Wales, and Pukapukan oral history talks of canoes arriving from many distant lands. And in the thirties a piece of pounamu had been found in a Pukapukan taro garden.
But my excitement about the Pukapukan dingo was short-lived. I found a paper by archaeologist Geoffrey Clark, who had read the original study and decided to look for himself at the bones of the creature. Clark argued very convincingly that the 'dingo' was in fact a Polynesian dog.
It is one thing to refute a striking claim. It is another to stop that claim circulating outside the world of scholarship. At the beginning of the twentieth century two self-taught ethnographers confected the theory that the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands were relics of a pre-Māori Melanesian population that covered all of Aotearoa. Elsdon Best and Percy Smith offered highly selective quotes from an already garbled collection of 'oral history' as 'evidence' for their idea. Just after World War One HD Skinner, one of New Zealand's first trained archaeologists, was able to visit the Chathams. He found linguistic, archaeological, and literary material that proved beyond doubt that Moriori were a Polynesian people whose unique culture had developed in situ on the islands. Moriori themselves had always told this version of their history.
But a century after Skinner published his book on Moriori the myth that they were a pre-Māori people still circulates amongst Aotearoa's Pākehā majority. It was taught in schools for decades, and has been given a new lease of life by the internet. The myth is popular because it suggests that Māori were not indigenous to Aotearoa, and that they took the country violently from their predecessors. Those who spread the myth are eager to claim that the supposed fate of the Moriori justifies nineteenth century wars against Maori, and the subsequent confiscations of Māori lands.
Predictably enough, a few online Japanese nationalists have seized on the supposed connection between Jomon and the South Pacific. For them, it seems to somehow justify Japanese conquests in the region during World War Two. The Japanese Empire was supposedly reclaiming old lands.
But the myth of Jomon in the South Pacific need never have been born. Jose Garanger should have given more weight to the knowledge of the ni-Vanuatu storians who helped him find Roi Mata's grave. Those storians preserve the memories of their people, but they had no memory of strange pots in the soil, let alone an ancient connection with Japan.
It would be harder for a new archaeological myth to come from Vanuatu. The Vanuatu Cultural Centre was founded after the country won independence, and it has been working hard ever since to decolonise research. The VCC has trained a vast network of fieldworkers, who use modern technology to document the songs, dances, and lore of their villages, and also keep an eye on their local archaeological features. Overseas scholars must collaborate with a fieldworker if they want to do research in Vanuatu. The VCC has also helped Vanuatu develop a cohort of indigenous archaeologists. One of them is Edson Willie, who has led digs on Efate in search of Lapita pottery. The colonial high-handedness of researchers like Garanger belongs to a bygone era.
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