Single Review on past events

Invited by María Cruz Berrocal, Christophe Sand, Director of the Institute of Archaeology of New Caledonia and the Pacific, gave a lecture titled “In a World of Islands: Humans, Environments and Monuments in the Old Pacific”.

The Pacific covers about one third of the earth´s surface. There you find a lot of islands which are divided in the archipelagos Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia– e.g. New Guinea belongs to Melanesia and New Zealand to Polynesia. Mainly after James Cook navigating in the region in the late 18^th

century, questions about its past and of how Europeans think about the Pacific began. But as archaeology is still a very young field there, questions about the first impact of humans on the islands started to be asked recently.

In his presentation Christophe Sand addressed the archaeological perspective on the multi-millennia interactions between Pacific islanders and their restricted environments as well as the very particular cultural developments on the islands that led to monumental architecture, among other interesting outcomes. He explained: “Humans settling Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia have naturally been intimately bound to the Ocean, but also to their landscapes. The Western vision of Oceania as a lost Eden, peopled – to use the terms of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – by “noble savages” in harmony with “mother nature”, has not resisted the scrutiny of archaeological discoveries. But what is often less well perceived worldwide is the long-term impact of Oceanic settlement on each and every single island, the unique nature of the interactions between human and environment during the long pre-colonial history, as well as the monumentality of constructions raised by traditional cultures of the region.”

The archaeologist presented first the historical context of the human settlement of the Pacific. Discovering the Pacific started around 50 000 B.C., but settling islands was facilitated by the invention of canoes from 4000 B.C. “When you arrive alone on an island or a new landscape you have to find housing and water, you have to go hunting to feed yourself and you have to create a community. Being in contact with other people is vital when living on an island.” Therefore, the settlement of particular islands is inherently associated to the existence of a network of interactions among them. Maybe as a result, Christophe Sand stated that Pacific societies were unbelievably dynamic in social and cultural terms, at the same time highlighting the scale of landscape transformations induced by anthropogenic impact on the islands, of which a main feature is the massive intensification of horticulture developed in some archipelagos, which required massive construction of agricultural infrastructures as well. “This went often hand in hand with the construction of different types of monumental structures, whose scale is testimony of densely populated islands and of complex socio-political systems.” Moreover he illustrated the diversity of adaptation strategies that were developed by the Pacific islanders over time.

In closing, he discussed the question of what can today in our globalized world be gathered from Pacific history, since the islanders have faced and solved (sometimes failed to solve) many of the most pressing problems affecting the world today: loss of species, degradation of the land, erosion… “The old Pacific islanders had the same problems that we face now, but they preserved the landscape. Another main problem of our globalized society is the fact that solidarity not really exists. But if you want to live in a community you need solidarity.”

More information on Christophe Sand: www.pacificarts.org/node/409