Voyaging

About three thousand years ago, adventurous explorers undertaking a five-hundred-mile open-ocean voyage (originally coming from the west, probably from the current region of Vanuatu) first settled the Fijian archipelago. Numerous subsequent migrations and settlements took place, from west and east, to form the Fijian population as Europeans encountered it in the nineteenth century.

Many voyagers eventually settled on the two main islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, while others inhabited outer islands, where canoe transport was essential. The arrival in eastern Fiji in the eighteenth century of Samoan-Tongan canoe builders, who employed a new Micronesian-style rigging, led to the development of massive double-hulled canoes more than one hundred feet long. These specialist craftsmen, working in the service of Fijian chiefs, also made beautiful items of regalia, such as ivory breastplates, which they assembled using canoe-building techniques. Canoes were originally built with stone-bladed tools, but metal acquired from Europeans accelerated the work.

Fast-moving canoes were used for fishing (see the elaborate trolling lure on view nearby), while spears, used by men, and nets, mostly used by women, were the main fishing methods in Fiji in the nineteenth century. The first settlements in Fiji are associated with the remains of a distinctive type of pottery known as Lapita. Named after the site in New Caledonia where it was first identified, Lapita pottery is the primary diagnostic material used to identify the presence of populations that migrated from Southeast Asia through Melanesia to Fiji around 1500 to 1000 BCE. The pottery is dentate-stamped (impressed with a toothed tool), which creates intricate repeating patterns, occasionally including faces and figures.