Customer Reviews

The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World (The Peoples of South-East Asia and the Pacific)

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I found this book to be of great interest although it was a bit more scholarly than I expected. Given how little is known about that part of the world and the Oceanic peoples I found it to be full of interesting information.

This book assumes you already know a great deal about pottery archeology in the region before you read it. It constantly refers to places of previous sites and findings but with no clue to where in the vast ocean they are. Author uses a variety of historical place names for locations, as they have changed over the last two hundred years, so there will be places you won't find in maps of your own or on-line. Like many books of this nature, the maps could be much, much better.

Text tries to tie together findings from across the Pacific, to track migration and changes in cultures, but fails unless you already know about the POTTERY of all sorts of tiny sites and can imagine where they are.

Because so much early archeology was focused on pottery, that is the main focus, and many places in Oceania have no pottery. There are other links between the migrations connections that are unexplored by this book, which seemed to be mostly about pottery.

I had hoped by reading it, I would expand on the general overview of this Lapita Peoples and multi-Polynesian migration which I already knew the broad outlines of. I found it impenetrable. I may try again from a later point in the book.