Article Review. Lapita Colonization across the Near/Remote Oceania Boundary

The Lapita colonization of Remote Oceania involved rapid expansion from New Guinea across one-tenth of the circumference of the earth. Implicit in most discussions of this phenomenon is a standard wave-of-advance model founded on demographic growth and the economic advantage provided by food production. The Lapita movement is also routinely embedded within a much larger narrative of the expansion of Austronesian languages and peoples out of Southeast Asia into Island Melanesia and ultimately east through East Polynesia. Although this simple narrative is very attractive, as more data become available, the details of segments of the Austronesian expansion require revision in order to reconcile the data from archaeology, linguistics, and biology. This paper looks closely at recent data on the Lapita portion of the Austronesian expansion and concludes that it is best explained as a leapfrog rather than a wave-of-advance movement out of New Guinea into Remote Oceania. This has important implications for those interested in modeling linguistic and biological variation in the region and highlights the potential importance of historical accident over process in our understanding of culture history.