The Lapita site at Votua, northern Lau Islands, Fiji

Abstract

Abstract Archaeological sites of exclusively Lapita provenance are important because they present an opportunity to tease out the elements of material culture and economic behaviour which belonged to the first colonisation phase in Remote Oceania from those which might have come later. Such sites are rare in the eastern Lapita province (Fiji and West Polynesia). We describe one from Mago Island in the northern Lau group of Fiji. Although excavations at the site were limited in extent, the modest range of faunal and artefactual remains should represent a more typical inventory of a single‐phase Lapita occupation than assemblages drawn from sites in which post‐Lapita habitation is also, and often inextricably, represented.