8

The first archaeological excavations (1870s – 1910s)

Matthew Spriggs

This chapter introduces the second section of Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of Archaeology in Oceania, covering the period from the 1870s to World War I. This period saw Pacific archaeology develop as a distinct discipline, with the first known archaeological excavations being conducted in various Pacific locations, including New Zealand (Brooks, Chapter 9, this volume) and present-day Papua New Guinea (PNG) (Bonshek, Chapter 13, this volume; Howes, Chapters 14 and 15, this volume). It also saw European and other imperial powers consolidate their hold on colonial possessions in the Pacific. These imperial powers included France, Germany and Great Britain, but also two less often recognised as such, namely Chile and the USA. Chile assumed de jure control of Rapa Nui/Easter Island in 1888, after a large part of the population had been kidnapped by Peruvian slave traders two decades earlier, and the remainder deported or forcibly relocated by Scottish entrepreneurs managing an extensive sheep ranch on the island (Van Tilburg, Chapter 18, this volume; see also Fischer 2005; Gossler 2005; Haun 2008; Maude 1981; Porteous 1978).

Hawai‘i (Mulrooney and Swift, Chapter 17, this volume), a unified kingdom since the early 1800s and the first non-Western state to gain full recognition of its sovereignty by Western powers in the Pacific, experienced increasing challenges over the course of the nineteenth century, from the ravages of introduced disease to dramatic changes in land tenure and the large-scale introduction of labourers to work on sugar plantations (Archer 2018; D’Arcy 2018; Gonschor 2019; La Croix 2019). It was annexed by the USA in 1898 and remained a territory until 1959, when it was incorporated into the Union as the fiftieth state (Saranillio 2018). In 1899, following negotiations with Germany, Spain and the UK, the USA added American Samoa, Guam and the Philippines to its Pacific jurisdictions and the border between German New Guinea and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate was fixed between the southern end of Bougainville and the Shortland Islands – this removed several islands, such as Choiseul and Santa Isabel, from nominal German control to the British (Diaz 2010; Go and Foster 2003; Griffin 2005; Memea Kruse 2018; Rogers 1995).

The effects of these political and socio-economic upheavals are reflected in the 10 chapters in this section. Several of them discuss archaeological excavations conducted by Europeans who had made the Pacific their permanent home (Brooks, Chapter 9; Nolden, Chapter 11; and Mulrooney and Swift, Chapter 17, all this volume) or were residing there long-term as missionaries or government functionaries (Bonshek, Chapter 13, and Howes, Chapter 15, both this volume). Others (O’Brien, Chapter 10; Herle and Wright, Chapter 12; Howes, Chapters 14 and 16; and Van Tilburg, Chapter 18, all this volume) address collections, excavations, observations and surveys made by travelling scientists of the kind encountered in the previous section. Some, such as British anthropologist A.C. Haddon in the Torres Strait (Herle and Wright, Chapter 12, this volume) and German ethnologist Paul Hambruch in Micronesia (Howes, Chapter 16, this volume), worked in what were then the colonial territories of their home countries. Others, including Swedish ethnographer Hjalmar Stolpe (O’Brien, Chapter 10, this volume), Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (Howes, Chapter 14, this volume) and British archaeologists and anthropologists Katherine Routledge and William Scoresby Routledge (Van Tilburg, Chapter 18, this volume), were active in parts of the Pacific under the colonial control of other powers.

Archaeology was certainly never the same after 1859, not so much because of Darwin and Wallace, although their ideas were certainly part of the zeitgeist of the time, but because of the general acceptance of the association of stone artefacts and extinct megafauna in the gravels and caves of Europe, brought on by the stamp of authenticity given to Boucher de Perthes’s finds on the Somme by John Evans and Joseph Prestwich that year in presentations before the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London (Daniel 1975:28, 58–61). Prestwich’s paper also recognised the antiquity of John Frere’s earlier finds at Hoxne. The Danish Three-age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages was now an alternative chronological method to the Bible and recently translated Egyptian regnal lists, with increasing numbers of divisions within the Stone Age. Daniel Wilson had coined the word ‘prehistoric’ in English in 1851 (Daniel 1975:86–87; but see possible precursors to the term in French and Danish: Rowley-Conwy 2007:156–159), giving a name to the period before written records where archaeology really came into its own.

Ideas of social evolution, that there had been progressive changes in human societies from hunter-gatherers to herders and farmers and then on to ‘civilised’ urban and industrial societies, were certainly around pre-Darwin and their relation to Darwinist biological evolution was never simple or direct (Trigger 1998:55–82). Some early practitioners such as renowned French archaeologist Gustave de Mortillet (1821–1898) believed in a universalist application of phases of evolution as revealed in the Palaeolithic cave sequences of France and Neolithic and later sites. De Mortillet believed that all human groups would have passed through these same stages, an idea that was tied up with earlier ideas of the ‘psychic unity of Mankind’ – that is, the belief that all human groups possessed ‘essentially the same kind and level of intelligence and the same basic emotions’, and that there was thus ‘no biological barrier to the degree to which any race or nationality could benefit from new knowledge or contribute to its advancement’ (Trigger 1989:94–102, 2006:100–101). But, again as Trigger reminds us, there were many variations on the theme of social evolution and the inevitability of a unilinear sequence in the later nineteenth century was by no means generally accepted. Indeed, a Romantic reaction to the entire idea of social evolution was building, favouring migration and diffusion as explanations of cultural changes (Trigger 1998:83–108). This was sometimes linked to a continuing biblical counter-narrative of the peopling of the earth, in part fuelled by spectacular discoveries in the Middle East of cities and peoples mentioned in the Bible (Trigger 1989:102–103).

In a recent paper by Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific (CBAP) Project PhD scholar Michelle Richards, CBAP Research Fellow Hilary Howes and CBAP Associate Elena Govor, they pose the question of when exactly Pacific archaeology can be identified as a distinct discipline, ‘following a prescribed set of field methods to investigate human change over time, different from those used for other areas such as ethnology, geology, or linguistics’ (Richards et al. 2019:308). They focus on three early archaeological exponents: Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, Julius von Haast and Otto Finsch. Miklouho-Maclay, while he did not excavate in the Pacific, clearly brought an explicitly archaeological interest with him, informed by the first edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS 1874). His research embraced comparative studies of material culture, particularly the designs in tattoos and those on prehistoric and recent pottery that might ‘provide some indications about relations among Melanesian tribes’ (quoted in Richards et al. 2019:317). As he travelled round the Pacific Islands he produced very precise drawings of archaeological sites such as stone structures, burial places and the petroglyph site of Feles Cave on Lelepa Island, off Efate in Vanuatu. He also had an interest in how stone tools were manufactured and used (Richards et al. 2019:317).

The stratigraphic excavations of moa-hunter sites in New Zealand directed by Julius von Haast in the 1870s, especially at Moa Bone Point Cave around 1872, were certainly among the first scientific archaeological excavations undertaken in the region (Richards et al. 2019:319–321). On the cusp of the transition to research we can begin to recognise as strictly archaeological in the modern sense, von Haast’s work stands out, as described further by Emma Brooks (Chapter 9, this volume). Von Haast developed a two-phase model of New Zealand prehistory, positing two distinct phases of occupation by two different populations: autochthonous Palaeolithic moa-hunters, followed by Neolithic Māori who lived mainly on fish and shellfish and produced sophisticated polished stone tools. He was thus again one of the first scholars to construct a sequence of cultural change in the Pacific. He was of course much helped by the fact of the moa, New Zealand’s very own extinct megafauna found in clear association with human artefacts. These often-giant flightless bird species were first scientifically identified and classified by the brilliant palaeontologist Richard Owen in 1839 (Anderson 1989:1–2, 11–12, 17–23). The same Richard Owen was a major figure in the description of extinct Australian megafauna. But a human association for these remained elusive, despite early claims for a human tooth and dingo remains in the same layers (Minard 2018), and still does in the twenty-first century.

Von Haast’s initial sequence had the moa-hunters as being of Palaeolithic age, based on analogy with European stone artefacts in association with extinct mammals, followed by the Neolithic Māori defined by their polished stone tools and – incidentally – agriculture. He used the sparse and equivocal references in Māori tradition to moa to argue for a considerable time scale and a separate (perhaps Melanesian) pre-Māori population. This view was quickly superseded when the association of polished tools in deposits with moa bone was admitted and had to be telescoped into a much shorter chronology, although the two-phase sequence was retained (Anderson 1989:100–104). The dating of these deposits remained controversial for many decades. As Brooks notes in Chapter 9 (this volume), von Haast also had a very early involvement in the recording of Māori rock art in 1876.

During his ‘Palaeolithic’ phase von Haast thought there had been a land bridge linking the North and South Islands of New Zealand and joining them to some other Pacific Islands. While this may sound bizarre today, we should remember that some other postulated land bridges of the time later turned out to have substance to them – one thinks of the Bassian Plain joining Tasmania to the Australian mainland until c. 14,000 years ago (Hiscock 2008:129, 140–141). This land bridge was of course part of the larger continent of Sahul, involving land bridges also between Australia and New Guinea (sundered by the formation of the Torres Strait c. 8,000 years ago) and between New Guinea and what are now the Aru Islands in Eastern Indonesia. At the same time much of the Solomon Islands archipelago was one long linear island, sometimes called ‘Greater Bougainville’ and similarly present during the period of initial human occupation there (Spriggs 1997:25; for Aru see Hope and Aplin 2005:30–31).

Another early Pacific excavator, also of German background, was Otto Finsch, who excavated prehistoric or early historic Hawaiian graves at Waimanalo on O‘ahu Island in 1879. Finsch followed instructions in the German equivalent of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was produced in 1872 by the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnography and Prehistory, prominent among whose members were ethnologist Adolf Bastian, who had visited the Pacific between 1851 and 1859 as a ship’s surgeon, and physical anthropologist and prehistorian Rudolf Virchow. Virchow also met with Finsch to give him some coaching in appropriate techniques before his 1879–82 visit to the Pacific (Richards et al. 2019:311, 320–322). Finsch’s publication of his O‘ahu researches included detailed maps and descriptions (Finsch 1879).

A later-to-be-prominent European archaeologist and ethnologist who visited the Pacific during this period was Hjalmar Stolpe on the Vanadis Expedition, 1883–85, as discussed by Aoife O’Brien (Chapter 10, this volume). He was clearly aware of Finsch’s excavations at Waimanalo as he collected – one couldn’t really call it excavating – further skeletons there and from burial caves in other parts of O‘ahu and in Tahiti. There was, as O’Brien notes, tension between Stolpe and the captain of the Vanadis and insufficient time for Stolpe to carry out useful studies at many ports of call. The material culture that he was able to collect was notable, however, for his attempt to collect a limited range of artefacts in each place for explicitly comparative purposes. He wanted to use his collections to investigate how ideas spread from island to island, making him an early exponent of this sort of systematic comparison that is much more a feature of the post–World War I ethnological efforts of the Bishop Museum and others. Stolpe was later to become known as the excavator of the rich Iron Age burials at Vendel and of the Viking town of Birka in Sweden but died before he could write up his work. His recording was of sufficient quality that others were able to publish these sites later (Klindt-Jensen 1975:109–110, 113).

Archaeology was stirring elsewhere in the Pacific, with France establishing its presence as a colonial power in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some early settlers and government officials began to take note of sites and buried artefacts in French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (Dotte-Sarout 2017). Gassies perhaps led the awakening, presenting evidence of a jade axe – found in supposedly Quaternary deposits on an islet close to the Isle of Pines in New Caledonia – at a meeting of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris on 18 June 1874. He used its apparent antiquity to disparage ideas that the Indigenous inhabitants of New Caledonia had only arrived recently from New Guinea (Gassies 1874). Dotte-Sarout notes that this is one of the first examples in the Pacific of truly archaeological investigation, in that it presented a discovery of material culture in stratigraphic context (or with other indication of antiquity) and presented ‘interpretations of the history of Pacific populations based on such remains’ (Dotte-Sarout 2017:23). The presentation, however, also brought up another more general obsession of the time: identifying the supposed race of the makers of such material culture, in this case suggesting a priority for the ‘yellow or Malay race’, suggested as having been conquered by members of the less civilised ‘Papuan’ race (Gassies 1874:497, as translated by Dotte-Sarout). The latter presumably were considered incapable of having made such a sophisticated artefact, just as their authorship of New Caledonia’s impressive taro irrigation systems was also often doubted.¹

One scholar who did not doubt that the irrigation systems had been built by the current Kanak occupants of New Caledonia, however, was government functionary Gustave Glaumont (1855–died after 12 Jan. 1916), a most sympathetic observer of Kanak culture based in the colony from 1884 to 1890 (Dotte-Sarout 2017:24–26; Patole-Edoumba 2013, 2021). Throughout his stay Glaumont was in contact with metropolitan contacts such as museum director and editor of the Revue d’Ethnographie Ernest-Théodore Hamy (1842–1908) and French archaeologist Gustave de Mortillet, who as we have seen was one of the great classifiers of the Palaeolithic of Europe and a prominent unilinear evolutionist (cf. Daniel 1975:103–109). Glaumont interpreted his finds in the dominant social evolutionist perspective of the time, heavily influenced by de Mortillet’s writings, seeing Kanaks and other Melanesians as ‘men of the Quaternary hiatus’ (Glaumont 1888, translated by Dotte-Sarout 2017:25) between the Magdalenian and the Neolithic (the latter Robenhausien in de Mortillet’s scheme, from the name of a Swiss lake village site).

Glaumont seems to have been the first to conduct archaeological excavations in geographical Melanesia, noting stratigraphy and depth of finds and photographing them in situ, both in New Caledonia and on a tour of Vanuatu in 1890 (see Glaumont 1889, and further references in Dotte-Sarout 2017).² His Vanuatu trip is notable for the publication of the first stratigraphic profile from Melanesia, with pottery revealed below volcanic deposits in a stream section on the island of Ambae (Glaumont 1895:55, 1899:66). Glaumont provided sufficient detail for Spriggs and Bedford (2021) to re-locate the general area of his section in 2007, confirm its stratigraphy and date the pyroclastic flow that the pottery preceded to 790–610 BP. Glaumont is also notable as the first to record the petroglyphs of New Caledonia, working closely with Kanak interlocutors to interpret their meaning (as described in Bonnemère 1895). Glaumont’s career is covered in the Uncovering Pacific Pasts exhibition at Muséum La Rochelle, organised by Elise Patole-Edoumba.³

Glaumont’s interest in the petroglyphs of New Caledonia was taken up by Marius Archambault (1864–1920), who had come to New Caledonia as a child and worked for much of his life for the postal service. Dotte-Sarout (2017:26–29) documents his racism and poor relations with the Kanak population, which doubtless contributed to his rejection of Glaumont’s position that the art and irrigation systems had been created by the present-day Indigenous population. He preferred to believe in a previous ‘civilisation’ who had passed on aspects of contemporary traditional culture he approved of to the Kanaks, before having been exterminated or absorbed by them. He saw some of the petroglyph motifs as ancient writing and compared them to Greek, Egyptian and Phoenician scripts, and authored a paper on this with Adrien de Mortillet, son of Glaumont’s mentor (de Mortillet and Archambault 1919). He considered the earlier population in New Caledonia to have been an ancient race whose modern representatives were Europeans. As Dotte-Sarout (2017:27–28) notes, his ideas showed influences both from cultural evolutionism and the growing literature of diffusionism. His last (rejected) manuscript was titled Le sphinx et le dragon and dealt with the iconography of ‘the primitive antediluvian civilization, the one which the legends preserved the memory of under the aspects of the Golden Age or the Eden’ (quoted and translated by Dotte-Sarout 2017:29).

Vanuatu also had a successor to the early work of Glaumont, in Marist father Jean-Baptiste Suas (1865–1933), again discussed by Dotte-Sarout (2017:29–30; see also O’Reilly 1957:216–217). He was sent to set up a mission station at Olal on Ambrym Island in 1892 and associated works uncovered burials at a depth of 7 m, perhaps unremarkable given the active volcanic state of Ambrym to the present, with frequent flank eruptions. Suas, following the common trope of the time, saw this as proof of an ‘intelligent’ earlier race (aceramic), succeeded by a pottery-using people and then a third migration of the contemporary population who were said to have no knowledge of pottery (Suas 1917–18). Suas’s intellectual networks were clearly very different than Glaumont’s and Archambault’s, possibly because of the anti-clericalism of most French intellectuals of the time. Instead, his mentors were Catholic clergy, notable among them being Father Wilhelm Schmidt, founder of the Catholic anthropological journal Anthropos in 1906 (see Aigner, Chapter 22, this volume). Suas published at least eight academic papers in Anthropos between 1911 and 1922, mostly on ethnographic topics, and two in Missions Catholiques in 1902 and 1915 (listed in O’Reilly 1957:216).

The 1880s and 1890s were also when some of the major institutions and societies with an interest in Pacific archaeology and anthropology were formed: what is now the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1884, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu in 1889, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1888 in Sydney, and the Hawaiian Historical Society in Honolulu and the Polynesian Society in New Zealand in 1892. The most prominent of the societies remains the Polynesian Society, founded by Stephenson Percy Smith and his associates in New Zealand in 1891–92 and modelled on the Asiatic Society of Bengal (now the Asiatic Society), which had been formed in 1784.

As quoted here in Sascha Nolden’s Chapter 11 (this volume), the remit of the Polynesian Society was promoting ‘the study of the Anthropology, Ethnology, Philology and Antiquities of the Polynesian races’. Polynesia was meant in the wide sense of the whole of the Pacific and Australia, this being the common English usage of the time. Just as the Asiatic Society had involved Indian members from 1829 and had its first Indian president in 1885 (Chakrabarty 2008), the Polynesian Society encouraged Māori involvement and published many papers in its flagship Journal of the Polynesian Society (JPS) by Māori and other Pacific scholars. Smith, as well as being the founder of the Society, which held its first formal meeting on 8 January 1892, edited the first 30 volumes of its Journal until his death in 1922.

The exhibit at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington on Smith and the Society described in Nolden (Chapter 11, this volume) reminds us of the key role of archives for construction of a history of Pacific archaeology, not least in enabling investigation of the widespread academic networks of the time. These linked the far-flung islands of the Pacific, and the, in this case British, colonies in New Zealand and Australia to the major centres of academic power in places such as Oxford and Cambridge, and Harvard University in the USA.⁴

Although the Polynesian Society did not begin the renaissance of publication of Pacific (mainly Polynesian) oral literature in English translation or summary, the work of Abraham Fornander in Hawai‘i being an inspiration for much of what followed (Fornander 1878–85),⁵ it was an important venue for publication of Māori traditions. As with Fornander, however, many of these Polynesian traditions were presented by Smith and others through a very distorted European lens (Simmons 1969, 1976; Sorrenson 1979).⁶ Ultimately these manipulations did a lot of damage to the credibility of Pacific oral traditions as a source of ‘real’ history from the 1960s onwards, a legacy that is still very much with us today. Smith’s fundamental ideas went back at least to Forster’s 1778 treatment, with the idea of New Zealand’s original population being Melanesian or mixed Melanesian–West Polynesian and called ‘Moriori’ after the inhabitants of the Chatham Islands, who were seen as their last unconquered representatives (Clayworth 2001). The Eastern Polynesian Māori later arrived on the ‘Great Fleet’ of seven canoes and wiped out the previous inhabitants (see Howe 2003 for a comprehensive summary of the history of ideas about the human settlement of New Zealand). There were vestiges here too of von Haast’s initial contrast of Palaeolithic moa-hunters and Neolithic Māori farmers to explain his two-part archaeological sequence for New Zealand (see Brooks, Chapter 9, this volume). Earlier echoes can again be seen in Smith’s characterisation of the original homeland of the Polynesians as being in India but as having important external influences from even further west:

There are traces of such influences to be found from East Africa, Egypt, and very strongly from some Semitic source, possibly Arabia. Dravidian and North Indian influences are to be observed in custom, physique and language. (Smith 1898:10, quoted in Howe 2003:195; see also the extended treatment in Smith 1910, based on articles originally published in JPS)

The debate over Smith’s views and those of other scholars of similar persuasion such as Elsdon Best continued throughout the twentieth century (Howe 2003:171–176). We shall return to them again later as we chart the growth of more specifically archaeological views of Pacific (pre)history.

As noted above, the Polynesian Society was not the only gathering point for scholars interested in Pacific origins and migrations. The Hawaiian Historical Society was founded on 5 January 1892 ‘as a local Antiquarian and Historical Society, affiliated with the proposed Polynesian Society of New Zealand’ following an informal meeting on 29 December 1891 (Hoes 1892:110). In its early years its members had some involvement with archaeological and traditional histories but this tailed off in the years after World War II.⁷ A third society that had an interest in the origins and migrations of Pacific peoples was the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1888 (AAAS 1889) and modelled on its British equivalent, founded in 1830. In its early years many Protestant missionaries were active in its annual conferences, such as Robert Codrington, James Copeland, R. Benjamin Danks, Samuel Ella, John Fraser, William Gill, George Pratt, Richard Rickard and Arthur Webb, just to mention those whose Pacific papers were published in the first two Reports of the AAAS in 1889 and 1890.

Alfred Cort Haddon was among the first professional ethnologists to be employed by a university, although his career began as a biologist. In 1898 he led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, involving other significant scholars of the Pacific past such as W.H.R. Rivers, Charles Seligman[n]⁸ and the linguist Sidney Ray. It was among the first of the comprehensive anthropological expeditions, a multidisciplinary team approach that, to a large extent, fell by the wayside with the development of single-scholar ethnography as pioneered by Malinowski, among others. With the benefit of hindsight one can see that with the failure of such an approach to take off, the full potential for archaeology as a major component within anthropology also faded, at least within what became the Commonwealth. Haddon is often considered a distinguished ancestor for social anthropologists, but the ethnology he practised was a broad church and he can be claimed as much by Pacific archaeologists as a pioneering exponent. This is made clear in Anita Herle and Duncan Wright’s treatment of him as a self-described ‘palaeontologist’ (Herle and Wright, Chapter 12, this volume) and their discussion of his continued relevance to archaeological research questions and practice in the Torres Strait.

Haddon’s interest in ‘understanding human variation and the distribution of populations over time’ (Herle and Wright, Chapter 12, this volume) used material culture comparisons, bioanthropology and linguistics. In his comparative study of New Guinea stone clubs and other work on stone adzes, he saw the potential of artefact provenance studies to illuminate trading relationships. Like many scholars before and after him, he tended to conflate time and space, with statements such as ‘doubtless our Neolithic ancestors did what our contemporary “Neolithic” Papuans are doing now’ (quoted by Herle and Wright, Chapter 12, this volume), drawing comparisons between the recent discovery of Neolithic Swiss lake villages on piles and the layout of modern coastal villages near Port Moresby.

Although Haddon himself never excavated, his recording of often recently abandoned ritual sites in the Torres Strait has inspired much recent archaeological research there, often instigated by Indigenous communities. There has been radiocarbon dating of some of these sites and further elucidation of the history and development of particular cult activity. The detailed records of Haddon’s expedition, while not in the strict sense of the word archaeological, continue to inform archaeological practice today in a very useful synergy.

While Haddon did not undertake archaeological excavations, these were soon to take place on New Guinea with work at Wanigela (now within Oro Province of PNG) commencing in 1904. This was, in effect, a salvage operation initiated by lay missionary Percy Money following the levelling of mounds for construction of an Anglican mission station, as described here by Elizabeth Bonshek (Chapter 13, this volume). Money had already made an agreement with the Australian Museum to collect material culture from the area, but it was Resident Magistrate Charles Monckton who made sure that much of the excavated material ended up at the British Museum. He also sought expert advice from Charles Seligmann in conserving human skeletons from burials with chemicals, but the attempt failed.

Prominent among the archaeological finds were carved cone shells as well as decorated pottery of a style not recognised by local people. The cone shells in particular were soon used as evidence in theories about the origins of the area’s inhabitants; they started off as archaeological specimens but soon became framed within ethnological debates of the time. This is not surprising as there was very little other archaeological evidence around to compare them to. The big names of early Pacific speculative history and anthropology all knew of the three cone shells in the British Museum and others to be found in Sydney and Vienna. Seligmann and T. Athol Joyce (1907) were the first to publish details of the finds, in the 75th birthday festschrift for early ethnologist E.B. Tylor, but they also feature in the work of Rudolf Pöch (see below), Robert Etheridge, Finsch, Haddon, and E.W.P. Chinnery, and the later syntheses of Robert Heine-Geldern and Alphonse Riesenfeld (Spriggs 2013). Some pioneer New Guinea archaeologists such as Jack Golson, J. Peter White and Brian Egloff also gave them due consideration, and they continue to attract interest in archaeological analyses (Ambrose et al. 2012; Wilson 2002). As Bonshek (Chapter 13, this volume) demonstrates, there is still much that can be learned about the different art styles and connections of the wider Massim area of PNG.

Monckton stated that he had been told by someone that the pottery was identical to that ‘dug up on an island in the Mediterranean’ and said to be the oldest then known (1922:117). Seligmann and Joyce (1907) were mainly content to describe the Wanigela finds and those found during mining operations in the Yodda Valley on the mainland and on Misima Island, rather than to speculate on their origins. But in a paper describing further Yodda Valley stone artefacts and mentioning Wanigela pottery and Conus rings sent by Money to the Australian Museum, Curator Robert Etheridge concluded:

I think it may now fairly be conceded there is ample evidence of the existence of an extinct, or at any rate former population in Eastern New Guinea, of a highly interesting nature. Although the information to hand is not sufficient to prove the hypothesis, it is possible that this [Wanigela] pottery and the buried works of art of the Yodda Valley Goldfield are the productions of one and the same people. (Etheridge 1908:28)

When he wrote, Etheridge had already seen Rudolf Pöch’s publication on his own excavations at Wanigela. As noted by Hilary Howes (Chapter 14, this volume; see also Howes 2017), Pöch had arrived in New Guinea from Austria under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna in July 1904 to carry out ethnological research, having earlier been a student of archaeologist and ethnologist Felix von Luschan, who became the first full professor of anthropology at the University of Berlin in 1909. When Pöch reached Wanigela, Money had withdrawn from the area for the malarial rainy season, leaving the field, and the excavation of an intact mound, to Pöch, encouraged by Monckton’s successor G.O. Manning. Pöch’s account of the research was published very quickly after his return to Vienna (Pöch 1907, and other publications cited by Howes, Chapter 14, this volume), suggesting that the pottery derived from ‘a population whose culture was doubtless a higher one’ (quoted in Howes, Chapter 14, this volume, from her translation).

Pöch had been interested in finding ‘traces of a Palaeolithic era in New Guinea’ (cited in Howes, Chapter 14, this volume). This was a bit of a continental obsession at the time, spurred on by the discovery of Homo erectus fossils on Java by Eugene Dubois in 1891–92 (Shipman 2001). Dubois had similarly inspired the Sarasin cousins, Paul and Fritz, to undertake research on Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1893–96 and 1902, where they believed they had found evidence at least of ‘mesolithic’ occupation in caves and encountered a group they called Toaleans still living in the caves, whom they saw as direct descendants of this culture (Kempers 1982:20).

Fritz Sarasin later led an expedition to New Caledonia in 1910–12 along with Jean Roux, again inspired by the idea of finding traces of a ‘primitive’ Palaeolithic occupation in the Pacific (Sarasin 2009 [orig. 1929]). Sarasin had shifted his focus to New Caledonia as representing the most ‘primitive’ Melanesian population and because of its proximity and possible land bridge links to Australia, whose Indigenous population were seen as representing the last survivors of a Palaeolithic lifestyle – yet again space and time were being confounded (Kaufmann 2009). His younger Basel Museum colleague Felix Speiser undertook parallel research in the neighbouring New Hebrides archipelago (now Vanuatu), also from 1910 to 1912 and with similar intentions (Speiser 1991 [orig. 1923]). They made significant collections of material culture and engaged in ethnographic fieldwork, but also conducted archaeological excavations of sorts.

Sarasin and Speiser both concluded that there was no trace of any Palaeolithic occupation to be found in the islands – still the case today – although Sarasin in particular saw the many flaked tools he encountered in New Caledonia as indicating a Neolithic occupation with still strongly Palaeolithic influences.⁹ He also investigated the site on the Foué Peninsula of New Caledonia, now known as Lapita (Sarasin 2009:33, cf. Sarasin 1917:121–123), although preceded and informed by previous research there of the geologist Piroutet (1909).

The year 1909 was indeed a key one for Pacific studies of prehistoric pottery, as this was the year Catholic missionary priest Father Otto Meyer began his own excavations on Watom Island, off the eastern end of New Britain in then-German New Guinea, as recounted here by Hilary Howes (Chapter 15, this volume; see also Dotte-Sarout and Howes 2019; Howes 2017). What he had found, and was the first to illustrate in line drawings, was what we now know as Lapita pottery, the earliest South Pacific Island pottery style and, beyond the main Solomons chain, the undisputed type-fossil of initial human settlement of the rest of Island Melanesia and Western Polynesia. Piroutet had found the same in New Caledonia but his description was only of ‘jolis débris’ (‘beautiful fragments’) (1909:608) and the connection between the two areas was not to be made until 1949 (Spriggs, in press).¹⁰

Father Meyer’s exemplary excavations, which continued in 1922 and 1924, led to the recovery of considerable quantities of pottery decorated with dentate (‘toothed’) stamps at about 1.5 m below the surface under a layer we now know is volcanic ash from a major eruption of the nearby Rabaul volcano. He quickly published accounts of his research in the Catholic anthropology journal, Anthropos, edited by Father Wilhelm Schmidt, as did Suas in Vanuatu, as noted earlier (Meyer 1909a, 1909b, 1910). Meyer clearly wanted scholars to be aware of his finds, and he also made an effort to distribute potsherds and other artefacts to museums in Germany, France and Australia, as Howes describes (see too Spriggs, Chapter 24, this volume for the Australian collection). He was interested in what the metropolitan experts might have to say of its origins, or perhaps he just wanted to persuade them of his own interpretations, based on surprisingly wide reading, that there was a South American, specifically Peruvian, connection for the pottery (Howes 2017:43). We shall encounter Lapita pottery again several times in this volume.

While Meyer’s original discovery was made following storm damage to the coastline at his mission station, the next discovery of Lapita was again as a result of human activity, in this case the digging of drains and planting work at a commercial plantation at Munuwai on New Ireland, German New Guinea, in 1910. As seen with Meyer’s donations of pottery to various museums overseas, international networks of collection and distribution of Pacific artefacts were well established by this time. In the Munuwai case, Mrs Madelonne Krockenberger, wife of the plantation owner, forwarded a small collection of artefacts to ethnologist Georg Friederici (1928:52). Unnoticed until the CBAP Project in 2019, among them was what we can now recognise as a complete Lapita-style pot-stand with cut-out decoration.¹¹ Efforts are now being made to find the exact location of the site and the current whereabouts of the Lapita pot. The accompanying photograph in Friederici’s article was the first to illustrate Lapita pottery, Meyer having only presented rather rough line drawings in his publications (Spriggs, in press).

The Germans were active in collecting both ethnographic and archaeological artefacts just prior to the loss of their Pacific and other colonies during World War I. Micronesia was another major area of interest of the 1908–10 Südsee-Expedition, which focused on the Bismarck Archipelago, Palau, Nauru and the Caroline Islands. It was organised by Georg Thilenius, the first director of the Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg, funded by generous donations from Hamburg’s well-off citizens (see Howes, Chapter 16, this volume). Another of von Luschan’s Berlin students, Paul Hambruch, spent six months as part of the expedition on the island of Ponape (now Pohnpei), site of the famous ruins of the stone ‘city’ of Nan Madol. The site had been excavated (or rather, fossicked) for a single day in 1907 by German Governor Viktor Berg. His death within 24 hours was seen by the local population as retribution for disturbing a sacred burial ground.¹² Hambruch was obviously more careful in his own surveys and excavations at Nan Madol during 1910. Howes (Chapter 16, this volume) gives a rich description of how his work was shaped by ‘colonialism, Christianity, and racial ideology, as well as Indigenous and women’s agency’. Almost immediately after he left there was an uprising by the people of Sokehs District, which resulted in the public execution of 15 men and the exile of the entire district population to Palau.

Indigenous agency is shown particularly in the persons of Ettekar, Hambruch’s translator during his time on Pohnpei, and the titleholder, the nahlaimw of Madolenihmw, described by Hambruch as ‘the proprietor of the ruins’. The nahlaimw conveyed most of the traditions that Hambruch later published concerning Nan Madol. Howes suggests that he may have wanted to make sure that his traditional knowledge did not die with him, and – perhaps as important – that it was his version of traditional history that was sanctified by being the published version. This version is still very much contested today by other groups on the island. One recalls the role and equally complex motivations of the main Māori interlocutor of Smith, Whatahoro.

The story of Hambruch on Pohnpei also introduces another ‘hidden history’ theme the CBAP Project has been trying to uncover: the role of women in the history of Pacific archaeology. In this case, the focus is on Anneliese Eilers, Thilenius and Hambruch’s student and one of the first women in the German-speaking lands to obtain a PhD in ethnology, in 1927. Hambruch died in 1933 with only one of what were to become three volumes of his study of Pohnpei already published. Eilers put together the second and third volumes, the latter a 400-plus-page monograph containing the site map of Nan Madol, still frequently reproduced by archaeologists today, and the abundant oral traditions about the site. As Howes reminds us, without her efforts all we would have of Hambruch’s study of Nan Madol would be a single four-page article from 1911. And yet it is Hambruch who is remembered, usually without any recognition of Eilers’s efforts to bring his project to fruition three years after his death. She was perhaps given more credit for the other three volumes from the expedition that she organised and saw published (Beer 2007:54–58).¹³

The German-speakers were not the only scholars engaging in archaeological excavation in the early years of the twentieth century before World War I. Mara Mulrooney and Jillian Swift (Chapter 17, this volume) provide a very useful overview of the excavation undertaken by Australian-born John F.G. Stokes, of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, in 1913 at the Kamōhio fishing shrine and/or fishhook manufacturing workshop on Kaho‘olawe island in Hawai‘i. It was the first stratigraphic excavation to be carried out in Hawai‘i and yielded a rich assemblage of fishhook-related materials and unique carved sea urchin spines. Stokes was possibly the first person in the Pacific Islands to hold down a job that was primarily involved in archaeological research. He accompanied Felix von Luschan on a collecting expedition to O‘ahu burial caves in 1914 (Brigham 1915). There has recently been something of a renaissance of interest in Stokes’s career; details of his surveys, particularly of Hawaiian temple sites or heiau, can be found in Flexner and Kirch (2016), Flexner et al. (2017) and with further information on his career in Spriggs (2017). All of these studies of Stokes’s work have benefited from the extensive archives, including field notebooks, maps and photographs, held at the Bishop Museum.

Stokes was hired by the museum’s first director, William T. Brigham, in 1899 and by 1903 was given the title of curator of Polynesian ethnology. His constant problem was finding time or motivation to bring his many research projects to publication, and his Kaho‘olawe general survey and this particular excavation were victims of this. They were eventually published by Gilbert McAllister after Stokes had been sacked from the museum for non-completion of work at the end of 1929 (McAllister 1933). It is always hard to write up somebody else’s work and it seems McAllister either could not understand or did not realise the significance of the stratigraphy that Stokes had uncovered. As Kirch (1985:12–13, quoted by Mulrooney and Swift, Chapter 17, this volume) pointed out: ‘the stratigraphic associations so carefully noted by Stokes were ignored’ by McAllister in his publication. Mulrooney and Swift also note that Stokes’s material, both his Hawaiian work and his research on Rapa Island in the Australs from 1920 to 1922, continue to be of tremendous use to archaeologists working in these places today. There are plans to publish more of Stokes’s pioneering work.

The expedition of Katherine and William Scoresby Routledge to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in 1914–15 is the last of the pre–World War I Pacific expeditions, as discussed by Jo Anne Van Tilburg (Chapter 18, this volume). The Mana Expedition also involved pioneering excavations, but is more important today for its meticulous recording of the stone moai statues and Katherine’s collection of oral traditions and toponyms that were fast disappearing as the Indigenous population were corralled into Hangaroa settlement and forbidden to access ancestral lands. Van Tilburg brings out both the good and bad in the Routledges, seemingly almost completely bad in the case of Scoresby, and the great extent to which the agency of Katherine’s local interlocutor, Juan Tepano, was so significant to the success of the venture. Katherine, as a ‘new woman’, university-educated when it was still rare for women, was in some ways betwixt and between, as was Tepano, described as a man ‘between worlds’. He spoke Rapa Nui, Spanish and some English, had travelled widely in the Chilean Navy, was village headman and foreman of the colonial sheep ranch, and was very knowledgeable about Rapa Nui traditions. As Van Tilburg notes, he inhabited neither of these worlds, cosmopolitan Chilean and Rapa Nui, ‘with complete comfort’. Their collaboration produced ‘an irreplaceable archive in support of Rapa Nui archaeology, conservation and ethnohistory’ (Van Tilburg, Chapter 18, this volume), accessible at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Only a little of its value was indicated by the book and article Katherine Routledge published before mental illness took its toll.

Juan Tepano was to go on to be the main interlocutor too of the next scholarly expedition to Rapa Nui, the Franco–Belgian Expedition of 1934–35 (Métraux 1940:3–4; see also Laurière 2021). In part based on models provided by Katherine Routledge’s photographs of Rapa Nui wooden carvings in the British Museum, Tepano was also to take up woodcarving; several of the current carvers on the island trace their artistic lineage back to him (see Lavachery 2021). As was shown with the case of Paul Hambruch above (Howes, Chapter 16, this volume), the absolute reliance of many foreign scholars on knowledgeable and interested Indigenous interlocutors was so often crucial to the success of the research described in this volume. Of course, this remains the case today and Van Tilburg mentions her own long-term close collaboration with a grandson of Tepano, Cristián Arévalo Pakarati. One of CBAP’s themes has been to investigate the lives of these often-forgotten Indigenous experts and to bring them to the forefront.

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