Living Past

In an island in the country now known as Vanuatu, there is a very exciting archaeological site.

It was discovered by accident but its importance was recognised as soon as the first pot turned up and the age of the koiwi was proven.

It is, quite simply, the oldest collection of the remains of humans we label "Lapita" (because of the distinctive pottery) yet discovered.

There have been 71 sets of koiwi so far exhumed: the bodies are disarticulated (it is speculated that they were left to de-flesh, before burial in small graves excavated in ancient coral). Many are missing their heads.

People have treated dead bodies very differently over the millennia. There are Neanderthal burials with red ochre, or shells, or remains of vegetation in them. There have been koiwi excavated from rubbish heaps. In one of the oldest towns of all – parts of it date to Neolithic times – people buried rellies in the (earthen) floor or under the hearth. Catalhuyuk is a town with no roads: living rooms – they were work¬room and kitchen and bedroom at once – adjoined the neighbours' places, and access was through the ceiling. Auntie would be buried pretty close to other people...

Some people kept entire modified corpses with them – the Chinchorro of Peru and Chile were probably the first humans to deliberately practise a kind of mummification, and they started doing so nearly 7000 years ago. They removed the soft organs and tissues and the skin of adults, strengthened bones with wood, stuffed cavities and made a semblance of muscles under the replaced skin with vegetable fibre or animal hair and – touchingly – recreated the dead faces with black clay or white plaster coloured red ... some mummies recovered show damage that almost certainly came from being handled quite often. "Just prop Grandpa over there sweetheart, so he can enjoy the feast too."

Archaeologists speculate that the living relatives of the Vanuatu people kept the heads with them, both as mementoes and so the dead could still be part of life.

Some folk have a distaste for archaeology: it attracts epithets like "grave robbers", " treasure hunters", "despoilers of the dead" – and while some of that did occur among archaeologists when the profession was beginning, the major driver has been always knowledge. (I won't go on about the real grave-robbers and treasure-hunters who are still very active. They're in it just for the money.)

The new knowledge that is being gained from the excavated koiwi is really exciting: a considerable proportion of the adults so far found (there is very little identifiable as children or infants) shows signs of gout and tooth decay. The gout is a genetic propensity, a founder effect, and activated by a diet very rich in kaimoana (some mollusc populations came under pressure early on – eg mussel-shell size plummeted.) The tooth decay is – almost certainly – from eating a lot of food rich in starch and sugar, foods that the founding population weren't accustomed to.

That founding population? From Taiwan, and possibly the Philippines, as best we know.

And they arrived in Vanuatu nearly 3000 years ago.

They were proto-Polynesians. Our remote ancestors. Much, much closer to us than Neanderthals or the Chinchorro or the people of Catalhuyuk.

The wind roaring into Colac Bay this November was bitterly cold, almost over¬whelmingly strong. It did overwhelm sever¬al of the tents at the Hui-ā-Tau, but did nothing to quench the hospitality of Ōraka Aparima. Meats and breads and cheeses, fruit and salads and pastas galore.

And kūmara and potatoes, blue cod and crayfish, ika ota and kina. And mussels – I get easily annoyed by pseudo-archaeologists – the kind who create wild scenarios of settlement here by Phoenicians! Celts! Egyptians! South Americans, who really came from the Pleiades!

Based on? Well, their imaginations and absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Archaeology is a science that is painstaking and slow, and that builds on past evidence. Today's tentative conclusions may be challenged by future discoveries, new evidence – and, as in any science, facts trump interpretations any time.

...

One of my family is a GP. At Med. School, they were taught the classic patient presenting with gout was a Māori with a relish for kaimoana, especially someone who'd just had a feed of crayfish. Gout occurs in the whānau, and good teeth are rare as people age. These things have been noted in ancestral koiwi here (altho' bad teeth sometimes were due to other factors.)

I joined in the happy feasting at the lunch in Te Takutai o Te Tītī marae with pleasure ... but somehow the little graves in the ancient coral in Vanuatu kept surfacing in my mind.

A long time ago, longer than we thought, hardy fisher folk from Taiwan ventured out to sea. They mingled with other peoples, certainly from Melanesia, maybe also from the Philippines. They spread throughout the South Pacific, and finally, to here.

And their genes live on in us. The past lives.

He Kōrerorero
nā Keri Hulme

 
 
 
 

Writer Keri Hulme is southern Kāi Tahu but lives in "Big O" — Okarito. Among her passions are whitebait and family history. In 1985 Keri's novel The Bone People won the Booker Prize.

Inside Issue 45

SEARCH FOR CALM WATERS

THROUGH THE TREES

MEETING TŪTOKO

ULVA'S ISLAND

ARM STRONG

COUNTRY EXPEDITION

HAVE YIKE, WILL TRAVEL

 

Issue #45 Published Dec 2009
© Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu