Leaving Safe Harbours: Movement to Immobility, Homogeneity to Diversification. A Comparative Archaeological Sequence from the Western Pacific

At the end of The Rise of Bronze Age Society, Kristiansen and Larsson called for 'a contextualised search for historical and evolutionary regularities in the formation of particular histories'. In reading the book and other works by Kristiansen I have been struck by parallels across the other side of the world during a period of rapid sociocultural change as the Lapita culture spread by sea from its proximate homeland in the Bismarck Archipelago, just off the eastern end of New Guinea, out as far as Tonga and Samoa in western Polynesia around 3,000 years ago. The reaching of Lapita's eastern margins was shortly followed by a radical diversification of cultures across what had been during colonization a homogeneous cultural and linguistic space. The question is posed as to whether the exploration of apparently parallel cultural sequences can usefully be developed into a comparative archaeology.