Mus�e du Quai Branly, Paris, stages the first exhibition on mainland France to focus on one of the oldest civilisations of Oceania
Lapita: Oceanic Ancestors at the Mus�e du Quai Branly, in Paris, is the first exhibition on mainland France to focus on one of the oldest civilisations of Oceania, a continent long considered as empty, or almost. This Austronesian people left Taiwan in about 2000BC, establishing the Lapita complex in the Bismarck Archipelago, east of New Guinea, some 600 years later. From there they fanned out, travelling as far as the Samoa Islands circa 850BC.
The Lapita mixed with the natives they met on the way, leaving behind them pottery with triangular patterns. The geometric designs drawn on the tapa (bark) cloth or pandan fibre mats still made on the islands of Wallis and Futuna, and Vanuatu bear witness to their passing.
In its contemporary section the exhibition (until 9 January) features some very fine tapa, which are fascinating from a political point of view. The curators, Christophe Sand, the head of the New Caledonia Institute of Archaeology, and Stuart Bedford, from Canberra University, have also chosen some magnificent ceramics, in particular large pots discovered in 1995 at Kon�, in the north of New Caledonia, funeral pottery dug up in 2004 in the cemetery of Teouma in Vanuatu, and from Tubuai, in the Austral Islands, a small male head in mother-of-pearl and a paddle.
Maps and videos describe the Lapita's travels, but also the story of their discovery. In 1909 Father Otto Meyer picked up a shard of pottery decorated with angular patterns on a Papua New Guinea beach. Then, in 1950 a French geologist compared Meyer's shards with recent finds from the Isle of Pines, south of New Caledonia, and realised that they belonged to the same tradition.
The term "Lapita" was coined in 1952: an American, Edwin Gifford, was digging on the Fou� peninsula. He asked a Kanak for the name of the site, but mistook the response, xapeta'a, for "Lapita". In the Haveka language spoken by the Kanaks xapeta'a means "the place where one digs". It was assumed initially that this referred to the work of the archaeologists. But it finally emerged that the Kanaks had understood that the land had been settled before their arrival.
Herein lies the exhibition's political significance. "Given the situation in New Caledonia, this discovery was enormously important," Sand says. "For a long time the Kanaks, who claimed first-people status, rejected the idea of any earlier settlement. Then the colonists used the sophistication of Lapita art to prove that there had been a more intelligent, more developed people than the Kanaks." Only in 2002 did they recognise the memory of the Oceanic civilisation.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
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