Vastly Ingenious
The Archaeology of Pacific Material Culture

Edited by Atholl Anderson, Kaye Green and Foss Leach

Key Points

• Major publication on archaeology of Pacific cultures
• Draws on very recent research
• Written by leading scholars
• Illustrated throughout

Book

Reflecting in 1769 on the manners and customs of the South Sea islands, Joseph Banks remarked that ‘in every expedient for taking fish they are vastly ingenious.’ Hence the title of this book on Pacific material culture, past and present, with broad themes of origins, the movement of peoples and the development of their technologies.

Bringing together an impressive group of scholars of Pacific archaeology, the editors have designed the book as both a thoroughly up-to-date and wide-ranging survey and as a festschrift for museum archaeologist Janet Davidson, until recently based at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Contributors Atholl Anderson, J. Stephen Athens, Helene Martinsson-Wallin and Karen Stothert, Susan Bulmer, David V. Burley and Richard Shutler Jr, Geoffrey Clark and Duncan Wright, Peter Gathercole, Roger C. Green, Geoffrey Irwin, Rod Wallace and Stephanie Green, Kevin L. Jones, Adrienne L Kaeppler, Foss Leach, Helen Leach, Sean Mallon, Nigel Prickett, Paul Rainbird, Yoshiko H. Sinoto, Ian Smith, Jim Specht, Katherine Szabo, and Moira White.

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Contents

1 Introduction
2 Early Maori disc pendants
3 Gourd artefacts from the Kohika lake village
4 Cooking with pots – again
5 Metal Pa Kahawai
6 A cache of fishhooks from Serendipity Cave
7 Horticultural site complexes on stony soils of the eastern North Island
8 Arthur of HMS Adventure and Veryan, Cornwall
9 Me‘a lalanga and the category Koloa
10 Ancestral Polynesian fishing gear
11 Reading Pacific pots
12 The rise of the Saudeleur
13 A study of gorges from the Gogna-Cove Beach Site, Guam
14 The role of fishing lure shanks for the past people of Pohnpei
15 Shell fishhooks of the Lapita cultural complex
16 The material culture of Makira
17 Shaft-hole stone implements of New Britain
18 Pottery styles at Wanelek, Papua New Guinea
19 Still vastly ingenious? Globalisation and the collecting of Pacific material cultures

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Editors

Atholl Anderson is a Pacific prehistorian based at Australian National University in Canberra. He has published many scholarly books and articles on New Zealand and Pacific prehistory and ethnohistory.
Kaye C. Green was a Pacific field archaeologist from 1958 to 1975, when she joined the New Zealand Department of Conservation as manager of publishing and science communication. She is now retired and lives near Wellington.
Foss Leach is a Pacific prehistorian who was based at Otago University until 1987, when he moved to the Museum of New Zealand. He is now retired and lives in the Marlborough Sounds.

Book details

Archaeology, Anthropology
ISBN 978 1 877372 45 2, hardback, 255 x 190 mm, 319 pp, illustrated, $59.95
Published: 2007

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