The Archaeology of Lapita Dispersal in Oceania: Papers from the Fourth Lapita Conference, June 2000, Canberra, Australia
Year: 2001
Type: book
Abstract: It was to have been the turn of Fiji to host the quadrennial Lapita Conference but the contemporary reality of an increasingly destabilised post-colonial Pacific intervened in the shape of a coup on 19 May 2000, just a fortnight before participants were due to arrive. It would have been the first major archaeological conference in the archipelago since the 1969 Wenner-Gren Symposium on Oceanic Culture History. To salvage the event it was relocated to the more prosaic setting of the Australian National University, a location in winter which lacks the tropical cachet of the Pacific, but which is well supplied with the people and facilities essential to run an international conference at short notice. The sudden change in venue unfortunately meant that some people were unable to alter their travel plans and make it to Canberra, particularly colleagues from North America. Nevertheless, around 60 Pacific scholars from Japan, Hawaii, New Caledonia, France, Fiji and Australasia did participate and delivered more than 40 papers, which besides providing an overview of current archaeological research on the west and central Pacific, also took us a step further toward understanding the Lapita phenomenon. ...
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W655823287