Riddle of the Bones

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Named for the site in New Caledonia where it was first found and dated in 1952, Lapita pottery, with its distinctive dentate, or tooth-shaped, designs across a red surface, is the signature of the people - believed to be ancestors of today's Polynesians - who began moving east of the Solomon Islands about 3,200 years ago. Their pottery, found in fragments at numerous occupation sites scattered from New Guinea's Bismarck Archipelago in the west, to Samoa in the east, is like a trail of breadcrumbs across the Pacific, left by these colonizing explorers as they moved with their retinue of plants and animals through the islands. Though evidence of its country's founding culture has been discovered in Vanuatu before, the story is far from complete, and when he heard of the driver's find, Ralph Regenvanu, the head of Vanuatu's Cultural Centre and National Museum, asked Spriggs and another ANU archaeologist, Stuart Bedford, to assess the site.

At first they feared the bulldozer had done its job too well, smashing pieces of pottery across the area. But just below the churned surface, in some places just five centimeters from the bulldozer's tracks, the finds started. When these people were buried, their graves lay near the shoreline of a beach, and the area is still littered with a ghostly confetti of coral and shell. Since then, earthquakes have pushed the shore about 800 m away, and the burial ground is now on private land used in recent times for cattle grazing, surrounded by a green tide of dense bush, vine and coconut palms. Some time later a village, now vanished, sprang up on top of the graves, perhaps as memory of them faded. Animal bones have been found with the remains, and large pieces of Lapita pottery appear to have been broken and placed in the grave pits. Flat pieces of coral had been placed where their heads once were, each topped with a ring made from a cone shell.

Most previous Lapita pottery finds have been too damaged for repair - few are in as good shape as those being unearthed at Teouma, and the team hopes several objects can be fully restored. The last week of this year's dig produced an extraordinary pottery bird, never before seen in the Pacific, one of three originally on the rim of a pot which contained human bones and was decorated with mouthless human faces. The birds were perched looking into the bowl: "God knows what that means," says Spriggs. Such objects will make priceless museum pieces. But the answers that the Teouma site may help provide are just as precious. The tussle over the origins of the Lapita and Polynesian people has boiled for more than a century, from the 1885 publication of New Zealand scholar Edward Tregear's widely debated theory that Maori were of Aryan descent, to Thor Heyerdahl's attempt, in his epic 1947 raft trip from Peru to Polynesia, to prove that South America was the Polynesians' homeland.