Teouma’s animal bones reveal how Lapita settlers reshaped island ecosystems
Source: “Vanuatu in the vanguard: new frontiers in Lapita zooarchaeology” — Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology ↗, 13 August 2026
Archaeonews Summary
A new synthesis of Lapita animal remains across the Southwest Pacific uses Vanuatu, especially Teouma on Efate Island, as its central case study for how early settlers combined fishing, hunting and animal management. Stuart Hawkins and Stuart Bedford of the Australian National University, with Bedford affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, review published faunal assemblages dating to c. 3200–2700 BP rather than reporting a single new excavation.
Teouma, discovered in 2004 and excavated between 2004 and 2010, exposed about 460 square metres of cemetery and midden deposits and produced tens of thousands of fish, reptile, bird and mammal bones. Fine wet-screening through 1–2 mm mesh recovered small remains often missed elsewhere. The site sequence spans roughly 3000–2500 BP and rests on earlier radiocarbon chronologies; the review presents no new dating programme and notes that a radiocarbon calibration plateau complicates fine-grained dating. No nearest town is stated.
Why It Matters
The importance of the review lies less in adding another species list than in showing what becomes possible when Pacific faunal assemblages are recovered systematically and analysed quantitatively. At Teouma, shifts in prey choice, butchery, pig management and the age profile of hunted giant tortoises can be examined together, allowing models of resource depletion and changing foraging behaviour to be tested rather than merely asserted.
That matters because Lapita subsistence has long been reconstructed from uneven evidence: many known sites have yielded little or no bone, while older excavations often used coarse sieves and had weak chronological control. Hawkins and Bedford’s article is a peer-reviewed synthesis by researchers directly involved in Vanuatu fieldwork, but its strongest conclusions still depend heavily on the exceptional Teouma dataset. The authors themselves stress that the 2650–2350 BP radiocarbon plateau blurs the timing of late Lapita and post-Lapita change. Teouma therefore provides a powerful model for future research, not a guarantee that the same trajectory occurred across every Lapita community.