THE
VOYAGES OF THE PAST TIMES AND THEIR CONNECTIONS
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One feels a
certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he
“discovered” Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the
British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the
sea, form lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This
latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society
Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on
Tahiti knew nothing about it. Imagine Cook’s surprise, then, when the
natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a
familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land
he had visited. Marvelling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and
culture, he later wondered in his journal: “How shall we account for this
Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean?”
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Answers have
been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island of
Éfaté, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient seafaring
people, the distant ancestors of today’s Polynesians, taking their first
steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window
into the shadowy world of those early voyagers. At the same time, other
pieces of this human puzzle are turning up in unlikely places. Climate data
gleaned from slow-growing corals around the Pacific and from sediments in
alpine lakes in South America may help explain how, more than a thousand
years later, the second wave of seafarers beat their way across the entire
Pacific.
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“What we have
is a first- or second-generation site containing the graves of some of the
Pacific’s first explorers,” says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the
Australian National University and co-leader of an international team
excavating the site. It came to light only by luck. A backhoe operator,
digging up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped
open a grave – the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old.
It is the oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors
the bones of an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that
derives from a beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery
was found in the 1950s. They were daring blue-water adventurers who roved
the sea not just as explorers but also as pioneers, bringing along
everything they would need to build new lives – their families and
livestock, taro seedlings and stone tools.
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Within the
span of few centuries, the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world
from the jungle-clad volcanoes of Papua New Guinea to the loneliest coral
outliers of Tonga, at least 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Along the
way they explored millions of square miles of an unknown sea, discovering
and colonizing scores of tropical islands never before seen by human eyes:
Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.
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What little
is known or surmised about them has been pieced together from fragments of
pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as
comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be
traced back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language –
variants of which are still spoken across the Pacific – came from Taiwan.
And their peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a
carved stamp into the clay, probably had its roots in the northern
Philippines. With the discovery of the Lapita cemetery on Éfaté, the volume
of data available to researchers has expanded dramatically. The bones of at
least 62 individuals have been uncovered so far – including old men, young
women, even babies – and more skeletons are known to be in the ground.
Archaeologists were also thrilled to discover six complete Lapita pots.
It’s an important find, Spriggs says, for it conclusively identifies the
remains as Lapita. “It would be hard for anyone to argue that these aren’t
Lapita when you have human bones enshrined inside what is unmistakably a
Lapita urn.”
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Several lines
of evidence also undergird Spriggs’s conclusion that this was a community
of pioneers making their first voyages into the remote reaches of Oceania.
For one thing, the radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal places them
early in the Lapita expansion. For another, the chemical makeup of the
obsidian flakes littering the site indicates that the rock wasn’t local;
instead, it was imported from a large island in Papua New Guinea’s the
Bismarck Archipelago, the springboard for the Lapita’s thrust into the
Pacific. A particularly intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the
teeth of several skeletons. DNA teased from these ancient bones may also
help answer one of the most puzzling questions in Pacific anthropology: Did
all Pacific islanders spring from one source or many? Was there only one
outward migration from a single point in Asia, or several from different
points? “This represents the best opportunity we’ve had yet,” says Spriggs,
“to find out who the Lapita actually were, where they came from, and who
their closest descendants are today.”
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“There is one
stubborn question for which archaeology has yet to provide any answers: How
did the Lapita accomplish the ancient equivalent of a moon landing, many
times over? No one has found one of their canoes or any rigging, which
could reveal how the canoes were sailed. Nor do the oral histories and
traditions of later Polynesians offer any insights, for they segue into
myth long before they reach as far back in time as the Lapita.” All we can say
for certain is that the Lapita had canoes that were capable of ocean
voyages, and they had the ability to sail them,” says Geoff Irwin, a
professor of archaeology at the University of Auckland and an avid
yachtsman. Those sailing skills, he says, were developed and passed down
over thousands of years by earlier mariners who worked their way through
the archipelagoes of the western Pacific making short crossings to islands
within sight of each other. Reaching Fiji, as they did a century or so
later, meant crossing more than 500 miles of ocean, pressing on day after
day into the great blue void of the Pacific. What gave them the courage to
lunch out on such a risky voyage
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The Lapita’s
thrust into the Pacific was eastward, against the prevailing trade winds, Irwin
notes. Those nagging headwinds, he argues, may have been the key to their
success. “They could sail out for days into the unknown and reconnoiter,
secure in the knowledge that if they didn’t find anything, they could turn
about and catch a swift ride home on the trade winds. It’s what made the
whole thing work.” Once out there, skilled seafarers would detect abundant
leads to follow to land: seabirds and turtles, coconuts and twigs carried
out to sea by the tides and the afternoon pileup of clouds on the horizon
that often betokens an island in the distance. Some islands may have
broadcast their presence with far less subtlety than a cloud bank. Some of
the most violent eruptions anywhere on the planet during the past 10,000
years occurred in Melanesia, which sits nervously in one of the most
explosive volcanic regions on Earth. Even less spectacular eruptions would
have sent plumes of smoke billowing into the stratosphere and rained ash
for hundreds of miles. It’s possible that the Lapita saw these signs of
distant islands and later sailed off in their direction, knowing they would
find land. For returning explorers, successful or not, the geography of
their own archipelagoes provided a safety net to keep them from
overshooting their home ports and sailing off into eternity.
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However they
did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the Pacific,
the called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast
emptiness of the central Pacific, and perhaps they were too thinly stretched
to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand
in total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds
of islands – more than 300 in Fiji alone. Still, more than a millennium
would pass before the Lapita’s descendants, a people we now call the
Polynesians, struck out in search of new territory.
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Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with
the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet,
write
YES
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if the statement agrees
with the claims of the writer
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NO
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if the
statement contradicts the claims of the writer
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NOT GIVEN
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if it is
impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
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1
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Captain cook once expected Hawaii might speak
another language of people from other pacific islands.
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Captain cook
depicted a number of cultural aspects of Polynesians in his journal.
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Professor Spriggs and his
research team went to the Efate to try to find the site of the ancient cemetery.
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The Lapita
completed a journey of around 2,000 miles in a period less than a
centenary.
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5
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The Lapita were the first
inhabitants in many pacific islands.
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The unknown
pots discovered in Efate had once been used for cooking.
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The um buried in Efate site
was plain as it was without any decoration.
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Questions 8-10
Complete the summary below.
Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading
Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 8-10 on
your answer sheet.
Scientific
Evident found in Efate site
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Tests show the human remains and the charcoal found in the buried um
are from the start of the Lapita period. Yet The 8…………………… covering many of
the Efate sites did not come from that area. Then examinations carried out
on the 9…………………… discovered at Efate site reveal that not everyone buried
there was a native living in the area. In fact, DNA could identify the
Lapita’s nearest 10…………………… present-days.
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Questions 11-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR
A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 11-13
on your answer sheet.
11 What did the Lapita travel in when they crossed
the oceans?
12 In Irwins’s view, what would the Lapita have
relied on to bring them fast back to the base?
13 Which sea creatures would have been an indication
to the Lapita of where to find land?
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