VANUATU DIG REVEALS ANCIENT TAIWAN ORIGINS
By Len Garae

PORT VILA (Vanuatu Daily Post, Aug. 23, 2008) – When Professor Matthew Spriggs did his PhD in Vanuatu 30 years ago, he was in fact studying traditional agricultural methods. But little did he know he was going to tap into the biggest excavation in the Pacific to find that the first settlers of the islands in Vanuatu were Lapita People who originally came from Taiwan approximately five thousand years ago.

The Teouma dig began by accident. A bulldozer digging to start the Teouma Prawns Project more than four years ago unearthed a piece of Lapita pot and a Vanuatu Cultural Centre trained person identified the fracture as ‘Lapita-designed’ and the digging started.

Professor Spriggs said the burial site dig has so far found 71 headless skeletons.

"This is normal since historical evidence has confirmed that after the burial when the flesh all rotted away, the skull was removed and most probably kept or worshipped as it was believed the head was the seat of the soul," he said.

Professor Spriggs said archaeological evidence shows without any doubt that the first settlers to arrive and settle in Vanuatu arrived from Taiwan via the Bismark archipelago in New Guinea and Solomon Islands four or five thousand years ago before sailing further to Vanuatu where they settled in the islands three thousand years ago.

Asked to confirm his findings about the ‘Lapita people’s’ identity, he replied, "If you mean where their physical bodies came from or their culture or language came from, let me say that Vanuatu’s languages today originally grew out of the indigenous language of Taiwan approximately 5,000 years ago. Linguistically all the languages of Vanuatu today belong to a big language family called the Australasian Family and the furthest that we can trace is in Taiwan.

"If you say culturally then I would have to say that things like the pottery and many of the stone axes of the Lapita Culture also come from the island of South East Asia from Taiwan, Philippine and Indonesia area.

"The ancestors of the Lapita People spread from South East Asia into areas of Melanesia that were already settled such as the islands of New Guinea and the main Solomon Islands. They then picked up various aspects of culture there like the earth oven ‘blong mekem laplap’. That was not from South East Asia but was in New Guinea. And many of the crops from the works done by someone living in Vanuatu called Vincent Lebot and his students have done a lot of work on genetics of crops and things like yam, taro and sugarcane come from the New Guinea area.

"Originally when people were moving from Taiwan they were eating rice and millet but as they moved south into the Philippines and Indonesia, those crops did not grow very well due to a lack of seasons. So they picked up all these crops, which come from New Guinea. So the Lapita Culture was a mixture of South East Asia things such as pottery, pigs, dogs and chickens and then technology which was already available in Melanesia such the earth oven and many of the crops which are still used by the people of Vanuatu today".

The Professor said it has to be said that the Taiwanese of Lapita Culture were totally different from the Taiwanese of today who are mostly Chinese who arrived there five hundred years ago.

The indigenous Taiwanese look more like Polynesians and they also revered the skulls of their death like the findings at Teouma.

"We have to say that the people of New Guinea, Solomons, New Caledonia and Fiji and other places are themselves a mixture of genes that came down from Taiwan, Philippines and Indonesia then they moved across into New Guinea and the Solomons where people have lived for tens of thousands of years, he said.

One thing that he cannot explain is why the Polynesians do look very different than people from say Vanuatu.

"Whether the Polynesians represent more of the appearance of the original Lapita People has to be proven because Polynesians genetically are very closely related to South East Asians. Where there were a few families that did not mix and married among themselves and that leads to the Polynesians, we don’t know. Otherwise one would expect that the Lapita People basically looked fairly similar to the people in Vanuatu and the Solomons today".

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