Pacific Chronologies

Oceans and sea-crossings figure centrally both in Polynesian histories and in the deep history of the region. Indeed what is likely homo sapiens’ first major sea-crossing took place from the landmass called Sunda, starting at least 50,000 years ago, into Sahul, the landmass that then linked present-day New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania.

About 8,000 years ago, sea levels rose separating New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania from each other, creating different kinds of isolation in the three islands. The rising and falling of seas, the joining and separating of water and land, are sometimes taken to be key events in this region’s human as well as natural history.^[202] It is but one of the ways in which Pacific historiography foregrounds not just geographical but geological and oceanographic phenomena. And yet the ancient migration that accounts for Australian Aboriginal people’s past is often separated out - historiographically speaking - from the much more recent Pacific migrations of the so-called ‘Austronesians’ from present-day Taiwan to Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, beginning perhaps 6,000 years ago. The Polynesian descendants of ‘Lapita’ societies explored waters and islands along winds to the south-east, migrating to Tonga and Samoa and eventually to the distant points of Rapa Nui (3-400 CE) and, in a different direction, Aotearoa/New Zealand (perhaps 1300 CE). The vast Polynesian voyages in double-hulled canoes have, for generations now, sat at the heart of the Pacific’s oceanic and maritime history.¹¹ It is known that the long journeys diminished and then ceased around 1300 and it was only several centuries later that the Spanish and Portuguese would begin to explore and trade in the Pacific Ocean. It was not they, but the French and British - another century on again - whose journeying facilitated re-connections between Polynesians and, so far as we know, new connections between Aboriginal people and Maori.

Claims about connection and reconnection over the island Pacific are made through genealogical, linguistic, archaeological and increasingly genetic evidence.^[203] ^{^[204] The ‘Austronesian’ designation is primarily linguistic, while the related ‘Lapita’ culture is archaeological, based on distinctive pottery found from Near to Remote Oceania.^[205] Connections have long been tracked and debated through Islanders’ genealogies and origin stories as well. In such studies, genealogies are sometimes treated as evidence - as a kind of primary source - and sometimes as history, a secondary source, a systematic ordering of the past through generational re/ counting. Te Rangi Hiroa detailed histories of Hawaiki, the place of origin over the seas, for example. Oral accounts were told and retold within Polynesian societies as history, and, when first presented in written translation, were unequivocally presented as history, as in John White’s multivolume Ancient history of the Maori (1887-91).^[206] In the Pacific region, then, we find pioneering methodological work on how oral accounts, memory and conventional text-based sources have been, and can be, productively aligned.^[207] This tantalising mix of genres, along with diverse approaches to the past, has made Pacific history a rich domain for thinking through just what history is. It is unsurprising that when the Journal of Pacific History was established (1966), its opening articles dealt with the periodisation of history on the one hand, and historical method on the other.^[208]}

Inquiry into human migration over the Pacific Ocean has challenged - perhaps even confounded - conventional world history chronologies. Privileging a ‘first agricultural revolution’ from hunter-gathering to cultivation around 10,000 BCE, and written language as requisite for ‘civilisation’, implies that oral-based societies and hunter-gathering economies were unchanging, and had either a lesser history, or even no history. Yet the so-called prehistory of Australian Aboriginal people is both at least a 50,000-year history and a modern one of connection with Macassan fishers across the Torres Strait to the north (from c. 1500 CE), and with British and French expeditions along the Pacific Ocean coast (from c. 1770 CE). And the so-called ancient history of Polynesians included settlement of New Zealand from a relatively recent 1300 CE. Indeed White’s ‘ancient’ history was based on contemporary evidence from the 1860s and 1870s.^[209] When the Pacific region is the reference point, then, ‘prehistory’ as conventionally defined has both a comparatively recent past, as well as a remote one. Thus ‘deep history’, ‘prehistory’ and ‘ancient’ history are drawn forward and folded into modern history in the Pacific, producing unconventional questions and problems.^[210]

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

Pacific Chronologies

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