A 3,000-year-old burial site in Vanuatu containing 60 headless skeletons and skulls in pots is helping end the mystery over colonization of the Pacific and the first Polynesians, archaeologists said Tuesday reports Reuters in the International Herald Tribune.
The remains have enabled scientists to reconstruct the lives and habits of the seafaring Lapita people, who settled Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa from Melanesian islands scattered to the west.
“We’ve got the archaeological record, but until now the actual people have been missing from the story,” said Stuart Bedford, a researcher from Australian National University.
The remains were found in 2003 at an archaeological dig on Efate Island, in the tiny South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, in a cemetery in use by the Lapita at the time of Egypt’s pharaohs.
The Lapita are believed to be ancestral Polynesians, moving east from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands over thousands of miles of ocean, taking with them their crops and animals.
The burial site at Teouma, on the southern coast of Efate, was first uncovered by bulldozers clearing land for a shrimp farm and was excavated by scientists from Britain, New Zealand and Australia.
The skeletons were buried with ornate ceramic pots, some in carefully laid south-facing graves, and in one case three heads were laid on the dead person’s chest, the researchers wrote in the October issue of the American Antiquity journal.
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