Culture · c. 1200–890 BCE
Lapita voyagers reach Polynesia
Nukuleka, Tongatapu (Tonga)
The Lapita people, Austronesian-speaking seafarers known for their pottery decorated with toothed stamps, had settled the Bismarck Archipelago off New Guinea by about 1600–1200 BCE. After 1200 BCE they sailed east into previously uninhabited islands, reaching Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji, and high-precision dating puts their founding settlement at Nukuleka in Tonga, the first landfall in Polynesia, at about 890 BCE.
Why it mattered
Crossing hundreds of kilometres of open ocean in outrigger canoes, the Lapita began the human settlement of Remote Oceania, which their Polynesian descendants would later carry across the Pacific.
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